Connor Beaton | Your Pain Has Its Own Intelligence: Shadow Work & Fatherhood | Wellness Force

Maybe the first place is to stop worshiping and praying at the altar of perpetual growth and ascension. We are obsessed. We're obsessed. We're addicted, we're fixated on and sort of reliant on this need to be special. And we are obsessed with this need to grow. And it denies us the experience of a kind of falling apart.

Well, Connor Beaton, welcome to the show, man. It's a total joy to have you. And my heart is so full from just the five minutes we had before you jumped on and we were just talking about your son, which I'm going to be welcoming my boy. Just. By the time everyone hears this, he'll be in my arms. So just thank you for being here, man. What a dynamic, twisting road it's been, our friendship until this moment. So thank you for being here, dude.

Thanks, man. Thank you so much for having me.

There's a lot we could dive off into. The perfect place is obviously the new father. Your boy is named Code, which I was just learning, which is such a cool name. And your wife is a marriage and family therapist. And people may not know who you are, you know, so if somebody didn't know who you were, which is obviously, man, it's always changing in the moment. But if somebody was just coming across you in public and they asked you that key question, everybody's like, hey, what do you do? What would you tell them?

Yeah, I usually just say, you know, I run a men's mental health company. And that's usually the easiest way to kind of describe what I do. Because in many ways, man talks. My organization is developed, has been developed over the years. It's been around for seven years now to support men and to help them through whatever they're going through, right? Entering into fatherhood, going through divorce, transitioning out of a career, selling their company and trying to find some different purpose in life. But that's generally what I do, is support men through arguably the largest transitions in life and to help them tackle some of those finicky, existential questions that come up, like why, why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? You know, so you don't, you don't.

Go on the surface. This is a very depth based brand. And it's funny because we connected through a friend, Mark Groves, and your circle and who you are and just how I see you show up, not just on social media, man, but just here with me. And in our calls we've had, it's someone who really takes their time. You know, you strike me as a very Mindful man. And I remember when you had me on your show, I was in Hawaii at the time, and the questions you asked, I was like, wow, they're really coming from, like, a radical depth. And so this depth that you've cultivated, it came from your own unique story. You were in a car. You literally had nowhere to go. You were like, what am I doing here? I'm at the rock bottom of the. Rock bottom. Can you just take us to that moment, Connor? Because a lot of people might see you and they're like, oh, yeah, he's got, like, the followers and he' the things. Quote, quote, tick the boxes. They don't know your story. They don't know what you've been through, and only you know how you feel about what you've been through. So can you share with us that moment when you're in the car? It seemed like a very powerful moment for you.

Yeah, I mean, the. That was. I mean, that was like 10, 12 years ago now. But I think the, you know, that was a rock bottom moment in many ways, sort of the ultimate rock bottom moment for me because there was a lot of pieces of my life that I had been avoiding and. And I had kind of been living almost like two different lives, you know, on the. On the one side, on the. On the surface level, on the front of my life, if you had met me, you would have found somebody who was having a great career, riding a motorcycle, traveling the world, had a great girlfriend, you know, had a great relationship, and all of those things seemed to be in place. You know, I was pretty confident, sort of cocksure, I guess you could say.

And I haven't heard that term in a while, cocksure. That's where cocky came from, right?

That is. That is where cocky came from.

That's right.

Yeah. Just to give us a little throwback, you know, into the 1880s, not the 1980s, but behind all that, behind the sort of, like, man that I thought people wanted to see was somebody who was wildly out of integrity, tons of infidelity, really out of control, addictive tendencies. And I hid all of those parts of myself and my life from the people that I really loved and cared about. And so how I ended up in the backseat of that car was that it all sort of came crashing down. You know, it came crumbling down around me. My. My girlfriend at the time found out about infidelities, my career, I was starting to question and why I wasn't really happy. And so that was starting to seep in and everything started to the. The mask and the illusion of who I had built started to fall apart. And what was left, what I was left with was the question of how do I even move forward? And so I was holding on to this, like, one last hope that I could, you know, just fricking word, spaghetti, word salad my way out of it like I had every other time. You know, I was so good at talking my way out of precarious situations and lying to people and manipulating and coercing. And I couldn't get out of this. You know, I couldn't get out of this situation that I caused. And so in some ways, it was like either either I continue down this path and this becomes who I am, or I let this break who I have been, and I. And I start to rebuild anew. And I chose that path because what I realized, and I didn't have the terminology for it at the time, but what I realized was that this hidden part of me, this shadow, as we're going to talk about probably going forward, the shadow of me, was not only destructive, but it was this sort of amalgamation of the parts of me that I thought were inferior, but also the parts of me that I needed to understand and integrate and work with in order to have a deeper sense of meaning, in order to have a more complete and robust quality of fulfillment in my life. You know, the way that my life looks today, having addressed some of those parts, having integrated some of those pains and insecurities and inferior aspects, is wildly different. And how do I say this without maybe coming across as like an ass? It's like I could never have dreamed what my life would look like today. Never. First off, I didn't think I was going to make it past 33 or 34.

How so? Why?

Why? Because I thought I would be dead. I thought I would have either drank myself to death or, you know, I used to. I mean, I used to have a death wish on my motorcycle. You know, I'd go 300 kilometers an hour, race. Street rac. You know, street racing through the hometown that I grew up in. And so I didn't think I'd be here. You know, I didn't think that I would make it this far or if I was, you know, I was going to be a complete disaster. And so the way that my life looks now is almost unfathomable. But I equate that to the work that I did to become, in some ways, I don't want to say just embodied, but in some ways, a man who was willing to face the hard parts of My internal architecture, but also the hard parts of life. And so that moment in the car brought all that about, made all that possible.

Yeah. And I'm sure if you closed your eyes enough, Connor, and really sat with it, you could probably have the tactile and the remembrance, the imprinting right now. Like you could be in the car right now. That dude, that young man who did the best he possibly could and really just to the degree he had his work done and his level of consciousness was the quality of his life, what was he in the process of getting just completely burned and pushed into the hero's journey for? And how is that an amalgam and really like a set of mirrors for most men at that age?

Yeah, I mean, I had been taught the. What I call the one rule of Men, which is very similar to Fight Club. You know, the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight club.

Right.

It's just like such a. I thought.

You were going to say you burn your hand with lye. The soap making scene, which is really intense.

That is a really intense. I mean, there's some intense scenes in that movie. But, you know, the one rule of Men is you don't talk about what it's like to be a man, especially when it doesn't fit into the mold. And for me, you know, I grew up in northern Alberta, which is like the Texas of Canada. There's lots of trucks, there's lots of country music, there's lots of oil money. There's, you know, there's lots of cowboys. And it's a kind of a hard environment. Right. It's like minus 20, half of the year. And I was sort of taught that you as a man, I've taught that one dimensional version of masculinity that you don't talk about what it's like to be sad, to be a failure, to feel insecure. You don't do that shit. Right? That's. Can I swear on your show is that.

Of course. I mean, we're humans, right? So we swear. That's what we do.

So, you know, it's like you don't. You don't do that shit. You suck it up, you stuff it down. And so who I was in the back of that car was somebody that had lived most of his life running from hiding, from repressing anything that came close to putting a crack in the armor of this infallible sort of superhuman man that I had created that I thought I needed to be in order for people to like me. I thought I needed to be invincible. I thought that I needed to be infallible. And I thought that I needed to be someone who never had any kind of insecurity and that that's who I needed to present to the world, Right? People like confident men. So that's what I did. But it didn't leave any room for error. And so all of the errors that I had behind the scenes, all of the. The lies, the infidelities, the worries, the fears, the insecurities, all of those, as my sort of colleague and somebody that I really respect, Francis Weller would say, and he's another marriage and family therapist, he would say, your pain has its own intelligence. And so I had become someone who ignored the intelligence of my own pain. And that in itself is probably, arguably one of the most detrimental experiences that most men are facing in our culture today. That they are crippled in some ways, they are less intelligent than they should be because no one's taught them how to understand, decipher, decode, integrate, and really, in a deep way, learn from the wisdom of their suffering, learn from the wisdom of their failures, learn from the wisdom of their pain. And it's to our detriment as a culture and a society, because we have men who are walking around somewhat unconscious of the manner in which their grief is acting in the world. My grief was so great. I was so sad and so hurt inside that I had no choice but to pass that on. I had no choice but to. But to get into bar fights and beat the shit out of dudes and, you know, cheat on my girlfriend. I didn't know what. I couldn't cope with the pain that I felt inside. And I didn't really have a choice because I thought that it was to be a man, to stuff that shit down, right? And that. That somehow that virtue of suppression equaled strength. That's the other lie that most of us men are living, that if we can just suppress hard enough that we'll be stronger. And I realized through the rock bottom moment that neither of those things were true. That my reality of what it meant to be a man suddenly got to expand in a really beautiful, powerful way, where suddenly there was permission for me to grieve my childhood and my chains.

The pain has its own wisdom. Like, let that sit for a moment. Who? I mean, the potency of that. It's almost like I almost. You know, that taste of aspirin in your mouth when you take medicine? That's kind of what I got from what you said. Your pain has a powerful, sacred Wisdom inside of it that I just experienced something very similar. And we're going to go right back to you in the car. But I had a moment when I was on the mountain at this 10 day vision quest. Four days, just water, nothing else. Water, a tarp and a tent. Connor. Wow. What came through for me there was my body. Your body. What you shared with us is always trying to communicate to us at all times. But we, like you said, have been taught as a society, especially as men, suck it up, pussy, put some dirt on it, get back out there, don't be a little bitch. Things like this, all that does is it sedates us, it sedates that part, it sedates that part of our heart that is actually here to live, is actually here to express itself. So, wow. And on top of that, if you were to just dovetail that in the moment for you in the car, what was it about that moment that was different? I'm sure you had many moments that led to that. There was something different about that moment that allowed you to actually turn to your pain teacher and go, what are you here to teach me?

Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess sort of two things. One was I had be. I had become very viscerally aware of what my pain had done to the people that I loved. Because I witnessed it, I saw it in their eyes. I couldn't look away any longer, you know, and the damage that I had caused people was such that it was one of those things I couldn't unsee, you know, and I couldn't unravel the consequence of it. And that's the problem, you see, I had become so gifted at getting out of realizing the impact of the pain that I was dishing out to people. I had become numb to it, I'd become blind to it. But in that moment really I viscerally saw the pain that I had caused the woman that I was dating when she found out that I had been unfaithful. And it wasn't something I could undo, you know, it was sort of like seared within me. And secondly, I had reached this place in my life where either I began to work with the pain or I realized that the pain was going to take me out. That's where I was.

That was the death wish when you're on the motorcycle.

Yeah, that was the choice that I was faced with. It was like this is going to go nowhere but me in some way not being here anymore. You know, whether it's, you know, whether it's me being reckless on the motorcycle, whether it's me, you know, getting to an even darker place and taking my own life. Whether it's me drinking myself to death or doing some, you know, a God awful drug and justifying that and you know, whatever the case may be, but that, that was the sort of demarcation for me. It was a kind of coming into contact with death in a way. And this is what initiation is, is that we, we come into contact with death. In any good initiation, you see death, you feel death's presence. You understand that mortality is real, that you, while you are living right now, while you and I are living and having this conversation, we are simultaneously dying. And it's the ignorance of that death, of that mortality that I had been running from in some way. You know, I was sort of playing this game of chicken with God or the universe or death itself. Dan, like, come get me.

It's all God, Connor. The whole thing's God. So. Yeah, I hear you.

Yeah, so. So I think, you know, just that that was, that was really it. I found myself in that place in the back of the car. Whereas like, either I change or, or, or I die, you know, either I shift or this is it. Like I can't keep, I cannot keep living like this. I can't keep hurting people like this. I can't keep hurting myself like this. And that was sort of it. So maybe I'll just pause there.

It's a beautiful pause point. Because there's something about your soul that even allowed you to have the gift of awareness from the pain teacher. Because if it wasn't in your soul contract, you wouldn't be sitting here, man. So there's something unique about your soul that we all get to witness and experience that allows you to bring your wisdom from the pain teacher so that maybe, just maybe, you can assuage or even shorten the suffering of the men that are out there. So thank you for that. Because that story hit me. I mean, I got a full body. Goosebump, chill on that one. I touched death recently as well. And it brought me back to how I was never initiated in life. I think a lot of men are hungry on a subconscious, very subtle level for initiation, but they just don't even know where it starts. They think it might be in an ayahuasca ceremony. They think it might be by doing a weekend workshop or a breathwork deep dive. And it's good intentions. In no way am I delegitimizing these men or putting them in a place where they're wrong. But the road to hell is Paved with good intentions. So somebody has these moments where they touch death. And I just recently touched death with two hands fasting in the forest. I mean, the realm is thin out there between life and death. It's insane. And so I'm curious. Can you share with people a man who's hungry for change, a man who's maybe either experiencing right now or has been through what you've been through, and they're like, wow, I can really connect with him. What do they do once they start to even allow themselves to feel all the feelings they've suppressed? Because that can be quite overwhelming for men. Let's start there. There's a cauldron inside of them. It's starting to bubble up. They have the courage to look at it. Where do they go from that place?

Yeah, I mean, I just want to acknowledge that, you know, the same can be true for women. Right. Women can suppress, but we as men, certainly historically, of course. I don't want to leave the women out in this conversation, Although, you know, I do.

Let's just say the human. Yeah, I realize that because you're such a great host with your man talks and the brand that really empowers men. And obviously the women that support men, if they relate in that way, it doesn't matter how you relate. Can relate with anyone, man to man, woman to woman. But the world needs strong men so that we can be a support for women. Just like the world needs strong women.

Yeah. Maybe give it to me one more time.

I think it's the place where they've gotten pierced by, like, a sword of adversity. They've been through some type of initiation. They feel like maybe it's a huge injury or the loss of someone they love or life. God has given them great spirit, has given them an opportunity to come down and bow at the altar of humility and make a choice. Because they're really figuring out, well, what do I do from here? Because I'm experiencing all these feelings I've never allowed myself to feel. Where do they go from that place?

Well, I would say that maybe the first place is to stop worshiping and praying at the altar of perpetual growth and ascension. We are obsessed. We're obsessed. We're addicted. We're fixated on and sort of reliant on this need to be special. And we are obsessed with this need to grow. And it denies us the experience of a kind of falling apart. You know, no man wants to fall apart. No man wants to come into. Into contact with. With the realities of what his Grief might have to teach him. And, and the fact is that when we really get present to it, what we're actually afraid of is that we don't know what that's going to look like. The truth. Like, whenever I'm working with a man who has gone on a similar path to me, whether he's working a 9 to 5 or he's a lawyer, he's an entrepreneur, he's a rock star, or he's, you know, like a sports God. This, the. The path is always the same, and the fear is always the same. That man is terrified of what will happen on the other side of not worshiping the God of growth and beginning to allow the wisdom of his grief to enter. He just doesn't even know what it's going to look like. And so begin to come into contact with the fear of what you think is going to happen. Because for me, I had been holding off on that for so long because I fundamentally thought that my life was going to completely be dismantled if I allowed myself to feel my pain, to listen to that grief. So that's where I think that's. And that that might be a little bit analogous. So I'll make it a little bit more direct. All right. Let go of your need to find any kind of golden gun or silver bullet. When I. When men enter into this work, they're like, okay, I'm going to start. I'm going to work on my shadow. I'm going to do shadow work, you know, or I'm going to go to therapy. I'm going to get a therapist. They do. So almost always from the place of. I just want that one ultimate equation that's going to liberate me so I can get away from this.

Exactly. Give me the thing as fast as I can so I can get done and get back to work. This is a very masculine Right. I've been there.

It's like, let's make this as. Let's make this as pragmatic. And it's like, you know, you're entering into territory that might not work like that. Consider that. Consider that what got you into the dysfunction that you have been in may not be the path that is going to get you out of it. That perhaps you're going to have to learn a very different, equally valuable lesson. Right. And this is where, you know, Jung talked about facing the shadow, right? Facing the parts of you that you have been rejecting and hiding and avoiding. So start there. What have you been rejecting about yourself? What have you been avoiding? What have you been Denying about yourself, what have you been lying about in your life? And start there, start to work on those aspects. Because when we do, we begin to reveal the parts of us that we have hidden from the people that we love. And then we wonder why we don't feel like they really know us. You know, such an interesting paradox. So begin with the things that you have been neglecting about who you are, or begin with the parts that you've been rejecting about what your life actually looks like. For some men, this is very challenging because it means that they have to come into contact with the truth, that maybe they aren't as happy and things aren't as perfect as they have been selling to the world for years. Right? Suddenly it's like, actually, I hate my job. Actually my wife and I haven't had sex in years. Actually I'm struggling with my kids and I don't know how to deal with them. You know, I don't even like being around them. I don't know how to interact with them. So that's part of the challenge that you as a man or a woman. But you know, we're speaking about men specifically, and this is usually a very specific challenge for men. That. This is a challenge that you as a man are going to have to accept that you are going to need to allow the lesson of your pain to, to humble you. And you're going to need to allow it to take you down a peg. You are going to enter into what the, what the alchemists called the negredo. Right? It's. The negredo is a period of decomposition. It's a space of breaking down, of decay, of allowing things to break apart. In, in modern spiritual terms, we call the dark night of the soul. And so in our modern times, we as men are terrified of entering into that space. But that's the space where the hero, where the, where the person, where the man becomes the hero, he enters into the darkness of the cave and that's where he faces the dragon and that's where the treasure is. But we have conditioned ourselves to avoid it. So know that you're going to enter into the cave. Know that there's maybe going to be a period of time where you do feel lost and that that's okay. Where you don't have it all together and that that's okay. Where you are literally getting the shit kicked out of you by life and that that's okay. I went through a two and a half year period after that, you know, after the being in the backseat of My car, where I, you know, life gave it to me. I learned a lot about who I was and the damage that I had caused. And I had a lot of healing to do, and there was a lot of grief that I had to feel, and there's a lot of myself that I need to begin to understand. So know that. Know that you are going to potentially enter into that period of life, but that that period of your life is going to produce the psychological soil for you to grow who it is you know, you're capable of being and becoming. And that the avoidance of entering into that space has actually sucked the soil of your psyche dry of nutrients and minerals that it needs in order to become the father or the man or the husband or the leader that you ultimately want to be.

And all the men that are unknowingly pulled off the path. And by the path, I mean the training, not just the work. I love that you have that on your website. It's not therapy, it's training. Boom. I mean, it couldn't be more concise, but also more powerful. Like people think, especially men, think of therapy as, like, some kind of shameful thing. I'm going to go talk about my feelings or I'll never forget this, Connor. In Encinitas, there was an owner of this shop where we would meet in the back for our men's groups. This is like 2015, 2014, really, my first couple years of doing the men's work. And he was like, all these men sit back there and I heard them talking. They just talk about their feelings and they cry. They're like a bunch of women. And when he said that, I was like, huh? This is exactly the reason why we're doing this work, because there is that unraveling still of the patriarchy. And I'm not here to demonize the entire patriarchy, but there are some pretty unhealthy parts of it. And a big part of what you discussed right now, what you unpacked so fucking eloquently was men get pulled off the path. And we get pulled off the path because our entire society is designed for us to do so. Whether it's porn shopping, promiscuous sex, unconscious relating, ego infiltration. Because I'm the CEO of the big biggest company and look at the awards we got. I mean, fill in the blanks, man. There is so many things that allow us to become almost like Odysseus when he was being tied to the mast in the ocean. The muse of distractions in our world can be so syrupy sweet. It can pull us off the path. How have you personally with your work and also how do you guide people to stay on the path with all these distractions, almost like the sirens calling us to come eat us with their sweet song. How do we develop resilience to be able to stay on the path and continue to do this work when it gets really hard?

Yeah, well, here, I'll give you maybe because I know after having worked with men for a long time that we love tactical shit. We like. It's like give me the, give me the. Okay, you've talked existentially, top three things. Give me the tactical things that I can do.

Even though it's a heart based problem you're not going to solve with the mind, but go ahead.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, yeah. So number one, I would say the key to understanding your shadow and what's hidden in it, the key to some of these pieces and staying on the path is being able to understand your reactivity. So your reactivity, you're not response, right? There's a difference in distinction. When you are responding, you're responding from a conscious place. Your nervous system is still grounded and in homeostasis and you are able to communicate from a place that is not attack oriented. It's usually more grounded and you're setting boundaries. Reactivity is an unconscious form of communication. You are reacting to an external stimulus. You are reacting to what the person has given you. And so one of the greatest things that we as men can begin to cultivate is to notice where we are reacting. You know when your partner says something and you just say something passive aggressive back and cut her down or you know, your boss says something and you, you know, you sort of like lip off back or whatever the case may be, right? You react to what they're saying or a parent, right. Your dad or your mom says something and you get angry and aggressive back with them. So your reactivity is a, is a neon sign that's pointing to your shadow. It's pointing to the moments in your daily life, hour to hour, minute to minute where you go unconscious where you're not there, where your shadow is in the driver's seat. And these are very important pieces because you can begin to see what's actually making me reactive. Why did I get reactive there? Oh, it's because I felt insecure. And rather than owning that, rather than navigating that internally, I just decided to cut that person down or I decided to shut down entirely or I decided to yell at them. So I didn't have to feel the way that I was feeling. So first, make a. Keep a sort of like, journal of your reactivities of when you get reactive, what you were reactive to. And a really good prompt for that is the story I was telling myself in that moment was, what's the narrative that you are holding about this situation? And usually the narrative is about you. Right? When my wife said X, the story I told myself was that she didn't love me. Or when my, you know, my dad said why? The story I told myself was that, you know, he didn't want to spend time with me or he didn't like me or whatever the case may be. So that's, number one, is reactivity. Maybe I'll just pause there because I have a few more, but I feel like you got.

I love this podcast. I love talking with you, and I just want to reflect. It's been about maybe a year, year and a half since I was on your show, and your level of understanding of these incredibly complex, multifaceted issues that men face, your ability to articulate that, is profound. So I just want to acknowledge that in you from the year and a half ago that we talked. Wow. And so there's so much there because we know that shame and we know that these emotions that are the lowest vibration, and I don't care if you want to quantify it by the Hawkins scale or not, the emotions of shame and fear and apathy and guilt and hatred and resentment, all of these things are part of life. They're God, otherwise they wouldn't be here. So we're all being forced to look in the mirror of self and figure out, okay, well, how can I be honest about the way I'm showing up in this conversation with you, in this podcast, with my lady, with my son, with my community, with my own audience. And so to the degree that we're being honest, isn't this truly. Man, isn't this truly about being honest? And isn't that what consciousness and the conscious path really is, is being honest and not just a subjective truth, but the objective one that sees all things?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, well said. Well said. Well, I'll. I'll drop maybe one or two more tactical things here and. And then we can. We can carry. But I just wanted to say one last thing about the previous part, is that when you're reactive, you are also upregulating within your nervous system. And so in a very. In a very simple way, your. Your autonomic nervous system has two parts. Has your. Your central nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system is responsible for the calm aspect of your nervous system. You know, it's the. It's the sort of brake pedal that allows you to slow down, that allows you to regulate within your body. And so when you are responding, you are responding to. When you are responding, you're responding from that parasympathetic nervous system. However, when you're responding from the sympathetic nervous system. So I got that wrong before. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for your upregulation. So when you're experiencing anxiety, when you're experiencing fear, when you're experiencing anger, aggression, you have upregulated your nervous system, so you're releasing cortisol, stress hormones, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's a cascade effect. So by understanding where you are reactive, you are understanding where your nervous system is moving into a fight, flight, or freeze response. And this is arguably one of the most important things that we can do as men. Right. Maybe people hear the embodied man term. Well, to be embodied is to literally understand what's happening in your body. And to understand what's happening in your body, you need to understand what's happening in your nervous system. And how you do that is by understanding how you are either responding or reacting. When you're reacting, your nervous system's hijacked, your limbic system is hijacked, you are not responding from a place that you're probably going to look back on and think, I handled that really well. You're probably going to look back on it and think, shit, that didn't go so good.

Yeah, I fight or I flee. But the big one you said that most people forget is I freeze. And this is where in your work you talk about the capital T, the lowercase T. Trauma.

Yes.

When men specifically have had sexual trauma or maybe physical abuse, or maybe a mother with bipolar or who was borderline, it can be so overwhelming to the nervous system at such a young age, and especially before age 7, where the hemispheres are still getting connected. I mean, the neuropathways are being laid down. So if 0 through 7 a child experiences capital T trauma like that, it can wire the nervous system for life to be frozen during conflict or to be aggressive and go to war during conflict. How do you see that playing out, both in your personal coaching but also your groups? How do you see that playing out with men specifically?

Yeah, there's actually, there's a. There's a fourth one that my wife introduced me to, which is an interesting one. And I'm going to bring this in, which is fawn, which is that we move into a response of appeasing the other person. So oftentimes when men have experienced, especially what I've seen, sexual trauma, men that have been abused physically, sexually, intellectually, emotionally by other men especially, they can move into a fawn response. And so what I see is that a lot of men that have been sexually.

Fawn. Fawn.

Fawn, yeah. So it's like when conflict arises, they, maybe they'll freeze and they'll. Their whole body will tense up. They won't really know what to do. They won't know how to respond. They'll kind of just shut down. You know, like the computer. The computer will shut down or they'll move into a space of like, yes, honey, whatever you want. Right. Because they just want to acquiesce because they've been so programmed and conditioned to just. To just say it's easier, it's safer for me to give you what you need and what you want so that I don't have to deal with the consequences. Because in the past, that meant danger. That meant, you know, getting punched in the face or yelled at or sexually abused or whatever it is.

This is why I've always been honestly triggered and less now than ever before. But when I first got into this work and I experienced it in relationship, the phrase happy wife, happy life, it is the biggest cop out.

Yeah.

For people not doing their work, not doing their training, as you talk about not doing their training, that's on the planet, it's not happy wife, happy life, it's happy soul, happy relationship. That's really what we're talking about here. Yes. Can you expand that?

Yeah. I mean, happy wife, happy life is just a. It's a old codependent saying.

It really is.

It's like my, if you're happy, then I'm okay. Right. That's kind of what I'm saying with the font is if I can. If I can just give you what you need, then I'll be fine. And I, you know, it came from a different place in a different era where it was like, if I just give this person, you know, what, what they want, then I won't have to hear about it. That was kind of the mentality, right. That it won't be a problem. Another problem for me to deal with because as men, that's how we often see things. We, we have been taught to over index our rational mind and vastly under qualify and under index our, our intuitive intelligence. And Einstein said, your rational mind is a faithful servant and your intuitive mind is a sacred gift. But we've built a culture that honors the servant, has forgotten the gift. And we as men are very much the epitome of that. We over rely on our intellectual, rational understanding of things. But then when it comes to emotional problems in our relationship that keep coming up that don't stop emerging, we wonder why it's not getting resolved. Because we're trying to solve that emotional issue with a rational intellectual equation. It doesn't work like that. You know, it's like trying to, it's like trying to solve a math problem with English. You know, it's just like those are two different languages. And so it's not going to work. And I want to touch on the previous part about training, because I think that's important. The reason why I call it training is that we, most of us are missing skill sets that we actually need in order to have fully functional relationships, sex lives, careers, fulfillment, purpose, health, mindsets, et cetera. So if you grew up in a household like I did, where discipline was a punishment, not something that helped me organize my day and my adhd, but an actual physical and verbal punishment, then you quickly learn, like I did that later on in life, discipline equals punishment. So guess what? I don't want to be disciplined. So I had to learn, I had to train myself. That's why I call it training. I had to train myself in the art of discipline so that it became a practice, it became something that was habitual, it became something that was ritualistic. And so it's training because I have to learn that skill. And many men don't have this sometimes in relationship communication skills because of whatever. Maybe they just weren't taught it. Maybe they experienced abuse or abandonment or neglect, maybe they don't even know why. And that's okay. But we have to learn the skills in many of these different areas, whether it's relationally, sexually, financially. And it's so interesting to me that it's okay in some areas, right? If you wanted to go and get an eight pack or a six pack, you would learn the skill to do that, right? There'd be a few different things to go along with that. If you wanted to make a million dollars, you would go learn the skill to do that. But when it comes to our relationships or sex, we as men are often like, we approach it in a very different way. And so we. But we shouldn't, right? It's still, you need to Learn skills. And it's largely that you might not need therapy. You might need to train yourself in the art of learning these new skills that are going to put you into deeper contact and understanding of what's happening within your body and within your mind. And that's causing you to not be able to relate or attach properly to a partner, to a financial goal, to what you want sexually, et cetera.

Do you believe in the law of reciprocity and the law of attraction? And how does that relate to things happening for us instead of to us? Because you could have rebelled so hard that you got full body tattoos and rode your motorcycle off a cliff. There was something about you, your soul contract, your dharma, however you want to describe it. Can you. Can you share with us your views on that? You know, the law of reciprocity, the law of attraction, karma itself, soul contract. What was it about your unique path that allowed you to pull wisdom from that instead of just being clouded by your wounding?

Yeah, I mean, I think that those spiritual frameworks certainly come into play. You know, the law of attraction, karma. I think in some ways, karma is that we end up attracting what we believe we deserve. And when I say that karma equals that we attract what we believe we deserve, I don't just mean consciously. I mean that at an unconscious level, we are attracting continuously. Remember, your pain has its own intelligence. So not only are you consciously attracting what you think you want and deserve, you are unconsciously, from your pain, from your shadow, from your grief, attracting what you think you deserve all the time. So you better wake the fuck up to what your pain is thinking, because if you don't, it is unconsciously attracting all the shit that you don't want. And so you need to pay attention to it. So for me, that's sort of at the epicenter of the law of attraction, that we are continuously attracting what we believe we deserve, consciously and unconsciously, and that however we want to describe it, divine intelligence, God, or even just the sort of, like, quantum soup of existence, right? That everything is information talking to itself, about itself. And in some theories that's true, is that everything in existence is just information interacting. Well, if that's true, then your unconscious information is still interacting with the things that are out there. So we better pay attention to it. And how we come into contact with that is through things like shadow work, is through things like dream work, is through things like the vision quest that you just went on, you know, to be out in nature fasting with nothing, you know, nothing but the elements, nothing but the Information of nature and the universe and existence around us, and that it's in those spaces where we really come into contact with and begin to disseminate and understand what it is that we are pressing out into the world and magnetically pulling into ourselves.

It's so easy to look back and go, oh, yeah, that's why it happened. In the moment that wisdom's not so clear. You know, sometimes in the moment, like when you're bloodied and barred, it can be so challenging to let go because to the degree that you have even looked at your attachment styles, your shadow, how you fight life's pace, how you fight the pace of nature, or how you work with her, there's so much intuitive intelligence that has to be taught, and I'm so glad you exist in the world to do so. Your mission is global. I mean, men are coming to you not just to look at their shadow, but to actually begin the process of, like, unwinding the clock inside of them that has been stuck at high noon. So when they come to you and they begin the shadow work, what does that even look like? Because you could start that. It's a very gentle process that's needed. If you do shadow work and you're too rough, you could potentially turn a man off from doing shadow work for the rest of his life. So give us the truth and the myths about how to properly begin shadow work.

Yeah, again, I would. The shadow work is not the sort of, like, golden gun. Right. It's a step in the process.

Pretty powerful, though.

Yeah, it's very, very powerful. And, you know, we. I think that the important aspect is that we ease into it, you know, that you start to come into contact with the things that you're avoiding and you start to. You know, I practiced. I played this game with myself for a while when I was going through this work and. And working with a mentor who taught me shadow work, who taught me Jungian psychology. And it was the autocorrect game. And it was to catch myself lying, to catch myself in the act of embellishing something and not telling the truth, and to then correct my behavior in the moment, real time. And it was such an interesting game because I became very present to how much I was bullshitting people, you know, and I was like, damn. I really. I really like fluff people a lot. Like, this is wild.

So. But.

But, you know, I think the myth. I'm not really too sure what the myths are around shadow work.

The reason I asked you that. I'm sorry to interrupt you. The reason I asked you. That is because when people say the word shadow work, personally, I think it's abused. I operate in the same worlds that you do at times. Spirituality, self development, self growth. And I see a lot of people really just abusing what shadow work is. Maybe we could even just start there with what you believe shadow work is right now in 2021, what you truly believe from your own heart and from your own experience. What is shadow work. And we can maybe just start there and then share some of the things that people have brought up that aren't shadow work, that are perceived as. So.

Yeah. Well, I'll go from a 2021 perspective back to Mr. Carl Jung, Carl Gustav Jung, who created the concept and the archetype of shadow work back in the early 20th centuries, 20th century. And, you know, for him, the shadow was an archetype of the Persona, of the identity. And, you know, he had his own sort of working of what that looked like, of what the identity looked like with the anima and the animus that represented the masculine, the feminine. But for him, the shadow was really a kind of alter ego, a splinter ego. I call it the Hurt Locker, where we store all of the. All this stuff that we don't like about ourselves. And so the act of doing shadow work is in some ways about turning towards the unsavory behaviors, beliefs, qualities of ourselves, our inferior parts, and beginning to not reject them any longer, not neglect them or negate them. So Jung's process is really about in a slow manner, not all at once, right? You don't want to try and eat the elephant one bite. Because what happens in Fight Club is Tyler Durden, who is this manifest character of the narrator, is actually a fabrication, right?

He loses it.

His shadow becomes externalized into this character. But that's maybe for a different conversation. So we begin to take it in one piece at a time. We start to look at maybe in our relationship, and we say, what am I avoiding in my relationship? What am I rejecting about myself or the relationship? What am I withholding? You know, some very simple questions. What do I not want my partner to know about me? What do I. What do I least want to express to my partner? What's one thing that I sexually want to explore but feel ashamed to bring forward? Those are some very simple things that we can begin to look at to bring that shadow out of the proverbial darkness and into the light. And so that's where we need to begin. Jung believed that shadow work needed to happen with someone or in some kind of Container, whether it was a group or one on one, so that the shadow couldn't continue to hide. Right. Because the part of the shadow is that it projects itself onto other people. It projects itself like we'll project our anger onto our partners. You know, if you've ever said to your partner, I'm not angry, you're angry, but you know, you know, you're fucking pissed off.

That's classic. That's projection, right? Yes.

And so, so we just begin to work with it slowly and we. And we begin to integrate these parts. And when I say integration, all of that means is that we stop trying to exile those parts. And. And we begin to work with them. We begin to understand them, and we begin to allow them to take up some space within us cognitively or emotionally. And in that way, we begin to almost digest the shadow into our being. So the, you know, maybe I can give you an example. Like who I was before I had a massive shadow because I was hiding a huge part of who I was. I was hiding lies and infidelity and et cetera. And as I started to become honest and transparent about the things that I was hiding, about the infidelities, about the lies. Right. Using that autocorrect process, what started to happen was that I started to have a more complete and whole view of who I was and am because I wasn't hiding all of these different aspects of myself. I wasn't hiding beliefs and et cetera. So that's a very basic part of it. I do think that it gets abused in modern culture because it's a very kitschy term. It's kind of enigmatic and it's mysterious.

Most people don't know what it is. They're like shadow work. What do you mean? Is that where I feel a bunch of stuff? That's basically where people go with this. What a beautiful explanation, man. So I think that one of the greatest gifts of the shadow, and maybe to the degree that the shadows larger, there's actually more gifts in there, which might seem kind of a paradox. Like, what do you mean the more pain I have, the more shadow I have, the more gifts there are. Well, there's a unique soul contract that's kind of esoteric to unwind. But if you really are honest with oneself, everything in your life is a byproduct of what you have. Not just attracted, but also who you're being. Like your way of being as a man or woman. But specifically, we're talking about men. Like, like so many people, so many men don't understand how their way of being continually perpetuates their shadow to actually grow larger. And then that's where cancer and disease and all these really like spiritual maladies. Not to quote 12 step. I'm curious how you feel even about 12 step, because I'm sure that a lot of men that come your way to man talks, they maybe are dealing with some type of an addiction. What's the bridge and what's the nexus of shadow work? 12 step addiction, man talks like, how do they interrelate with one another? And what's the right fit for one another?

That's a good question. There's a few points of intersection there.

There's some overlap, but I know there's probably things that blend well and blend don't.

Yeah, Well, I think 12 step can work for a lot of people. You know, I think from my viewpoint, addiction is often an attachment dysfunction. And it's a. It's an attachment dysfunction because at some point in life, whether it's because of trauma or abuse or whatever the case may be, someone has learned that it's not safe for them to attach properly or coherently to other people. And they carry that pain internally. And so they need to. They need an external substance to give them that attachment. So rather than attaching to a person, they attach to a substance. Right. And that's what they become attached to. That's where they find safety and security. And with the shadow, that can happen in a way as well, where we can find safety and security through attaching to avoidance, attaching to repression, attaching to suppression, all as forms of finding survival. You know, in a household where we're being neglected or we were abandoned or we experienced abuse or, you know, maybe we grew up in a great household and we experienced some of those things in school, or we just didn't feel like we belonged in some capacity. So there. There certainly are some overlays. And interestingly enough, I believe I'd have to, like. I don't want to use the word fact check, but I'd have to, like, go and check this. I believe that 12 step obviously became. Because the founder had this incredible mushroom journey, and he was dealing with addiction, but also his brother, I believe it was his brother was working with Jung, and he was an addict, he was an alcoholic. And Jung really.

This is the first time I've heard this.

Yeah. Had worked with him and basically had told him that on some level, there was nothing that he. That Jung could do to support him. Because his issue was a spiritual one. His problem was A spiritual one. And he needed to find God in some capacity. Whatever version of that it was for him. And it sent him on, on that part of that quest. And so I'm pretty sure it was his brother. I'm gonna have to like go look that up so that next time I talk about this in the podcast, I'm like a thousand person.

Oh my God, dude. But someone please drop that in the comments. If you're watching this on YouTube or wherever you're watching this, like, please post that down below because I. My mind and actually when you're saying that my whole body lit up, I'm like even more evidence that you cannot heal using the mind for an emotional and spiritual construct. You can't do it like you talked about earlier, English to Spanish or your analogy. You just can't. You just can't. So I want to honor and respect your wisdom that you are able to give people sound bites and digestible action items, because that's important. We live in the 3D. We're not always in 4 and 5. But please, I digress. Continue at this nexus point of the addiction and man talks and who it's for and who it's not for.

Yeah, well, within the context of man talks, we developed a few programs. I developed a shadow work program and we have weekends and there's some groups and there's a space called the alliance where really it's a place for men to come in and repair those attachments, to work on their shadow, to understand how they're sabotaging in the relationship, to understand how their insecurities are maybe sabotaging their career. And it's a place for them to repair and have non competitive relationships with other men. Because for most of us, we've grown up having very competitive relationships with other men. And because of that, we hide aspects of ourselves. Because when you're, when you're competing with somebody, it's just natural that you hide your weaknesses, right? You hide your vulnerabilities. And so we have, it's a, it's a group. There's hundreds and hundreds of men from around the world. You get your own team. We have monthly challenges. There's a monthly book club. I bring in a monthly resource from, you know, sex therapists to quantum mechanics, quantum physicists, and just like cool people to come in and talk. And it's a space for men to have challenge based relationships where you can show up and be challenged by another man and they can call you forward, but it's always from a place of here's who you have told me you want to be. And I'm just helping to hold you firmly and assertively but lovingly to that man, to that father, to that husband and leader that you've said you want to be. So that's what the alliance is all about. And it might be a good thing for guys to check out.

Well, the site is mantalks.com training, and if you scroll down to the shadow work program specifically, Connor, you're super generous, man. You guys just enter code Wellness Force. You get a discount on the program. So I want to pivot a little bit before we say goodbye, because there's some ground I wanted to cover with you. And it was specifically about this fathering aspect, not just of code, but of your businessman talks and of being a father in your community. The word fathering, for whatever reason, I feel that there's a wounding around the masculine right now that runs very, very deep. I know. I feel it myself a lot when I hear the terms toxic masculinity and the shaming of men and women. Men need to suck it up and, like, you know, really pay attention to what the women need. And I find it utterly fascinating how I just had a altercation with a free birthing movement, and I'm not going to name them here because I'm not here to slander, but I had an altercation with the founder of a free birthing movement, and she literally on a call to me, said, the time for men to lead is over, and we need a matriarchy in the world again. We need to have women rule the world. And I said, isn't that what men are doing that you're upset about? Can we put down the weapons? Can we lead in this world together? Can we stop wounding each other about who's in control and who's in power? There doesn't need to be a matriarch or a patriarch anymore. Let's do a social arc together. Let's do a humanity arc together so that we can actually lead this from a place of wholeness and completeness and not wounding. So how do you see that dialogue in your groups dealing with really the dark parts of the shadow of the masculine that are coming up now to be healed? And how does that narrative play out in your groups?

Oh, it's a. I mean, it's a very. There's a few different avenues within that question. It's quite a full question I like to ask.

Big ones, man.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Especially when I have you on the podcast, like, let's. Let's give people some truth they can really feel and take inspired action from a new way of being, a new way of thinking.

Yeah. I mean, I think there's two avenues going to answer this with. One of them is actually from a man that I had on my show. His name is Steven Jenkinson. And he kind of blew my mind a little bit. He's an elder in some ways, and he talked about patriarchy and he broke down the. The actual etymology of the word, which I found fascinating. And I hadn't known and I didn't, you know, sent me into this sort of like rabbit hole of researching. But, you know, patriarchy, if you break it down into its root words, Patros is the Latin for father, and archie is the. Is a Latin, which is a little bit more complicated. So I'm going to simplify it. But it means to uphold. To uphold. And so patriarchy in its essence is about upholding the father both within the household and within. Not pedestaling a man, not having a man become supreme leader or any of those things, but the maintenance, the social maintenance of the father as a very important role. And that matriarchy is in many ways an equivalent to that. And so they're meant to be in some ways equal. They're meant to have an equality to them. And we could get into all the reasons why that hasn't happened. But for me, you know, I think that the work that we do in many ways is about learning how to father ourselves as men, that we stop offloading the responsibility of our wellness, of our strength, of our confidence, of our well being onto other people. Because the truth is, if we're really honest, there's a lot of men out there who have no idea how to tend to the wounded child that they've been carrying around for years. Where has he gone? You know, if you were abused as a child, where did that child go? Nowhere. He's in you. He is you. And if you don't know how to take care of him, he's going to cause havoc in your life. If you don't know how to parent him and father him, he's going to cause havoc when you become a father. I was recently, I have a client who came to me because he had a son. And for the first few months of having a son, every time his son cried, he wanted to punch a hole through the wall.

Huh.

So much rage was coming up. And the reason was that his inner child felt like there was no room for it. The boy within him who had to become a man at the age of 9 or 10 because of divorce and et cetera and measurement with his mom, I'm not going to get too, too deep into it. He had to step into this role and his, his inner child was angry, he was pissed, right? But he didn't know how to tend to that because he didn't have a father around. He didn't, he didn't have any examples of what a father even looked like. So he's having to learn again, train himself in the skill to develop the skill of being able to father his own younger self. The teenager that wants to, you know, wreck, wreck his life, you know, the child in him that is wounded and lonely. And so, you know, I think a huge part of the work is learning how to father yourself. Because if you can't do that, if you cannot step into a mature version of masculinity where you know not how to control yourself, because where we are in control, we are often out of power, but rather that you learn how to tend to yourself. You learn how to mend the parts of you that sometimes feel broken or hurt. Right? You learn how to deal with the inner parts of yourself that are sometimes wanting to rage against whatever Republicans, Democrats, teachers, the machine, the financial institutions, etc. You learn how to be with those parts that are chaotic and destructive. And that's where it needs to start. So for us within the alliance, all that we do is we help men train themselves in the art of being self led. We help them not overcome, but integrate and initiate themselves through the obstacles that they're facing in their life into more sovereign, self, self authored men that can then bring their gifts more fully out into the world. Because that's actually again to go back to Francis Weller, what the purpose of an initiated man is not that he reaches some pinnacle of self help and personal development, but rather that he becomes more capable, more fully capable of entering into his community and into his society and being functional for them and being of contribution to his children and the children of his friends and his friends and just people in general. And so that's, that's really what we're up to.

If I could summarize, it's a beautiful summary. That really is where there's no more war because we have to stop the war. The war of the sexes, the war of the Democrat, Republican. And so many wars are really just arbiters of control. And I feel like the more that we perpetuate my intention with bringing up what I was sharing was to address the elephant in the room. And that is that There is no war of the sexes anymore. People think that men versus women and men and women are different. Yes, we have our core differences that deserve honor and respect, and we also have our unique core similarities. So for you, as a man, as a leader, with this movement, with the alliance, and with the shadow work and everything else, if you were to reflect back and just look back on a timeline of 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, what are you most grateful for that you were able to see within your own shadow that allowed you to be the man and the father you are for code.

Well, I mean, first, you know, I'm always grateful simply to just be here. The fact that I get to breathe.

In a body, man, we're still living, we're still alive, you guys. Come on, be grateful.

I'm in this little, you know, this wonderful six foot one meat sack, and I get to walk around and be with my boy and breathe the air and hike. And that's. That's wonderful.

Yeah.

But I think what I'm. What I'm really grateful for is, is the. The capacity for two things. One, to face the. The truly hard aspects of my life. Really hard, you know, to be able to look back at my childhood and look at the unsavory aspects where, you know, there. Where there was abuse, to look at the addict in me and to face the really hard parts of my own life is a gift. And the second part is the willingness in some ways and the courage in other ways to allow change to change me and to surrender to change, which is a radically hard thing to do because most of us spend days, weeks, months, years and lifetimes bucking against the wisdom of change when it knocks on our door. And so I'm very grateful for that. Because if I had not embraced change when it began to show up in my life, I don't. I actually have no idea where I'd be now.

I've gotten so many amazing things from you today, and this is why I love podcasting from my teeth to my toes, dude. I love what we do. I love it so much because our ability to connect as men, as human beings in a way that, let's be real, maybe we wouldn't connect like this in person. Well, maybe we would, maybe we wouldn't, but it wouldn't be this special and it wouldn't be this timely. Because one of the biggest things I got from you was if the wisdom of the heart is what the world needs, then we have to listen to the intelligence of our own pain, because the intelligence of our own Pain is what gives us, in your words, that real wisdom, that real wisdom that the heart can speak from. And I think I've been my most intelligent when my heart has been broken. That's what's made me the most intelligent in my whole life, is when my heart has been absolutely crushed and everything has fallen down and work and women and money and everything's just like crashed to the floor. From that space, something new can emerge, something can die. So something can live. So we're always in this cycle of death and rebirth. Connor, you just, you know, homage to your, to your passing of your pet that left the world and right around the same time Code came into the world. We're honoring this cycle of birth and death. And my son's about to be born. And so in this cycle, in the middle of this cycle, there's wellness. We are meant to live well. We are meant to have well being here. Men. So how do you describe this? How do you define wellness? What is Connor's definition of wellness?

Well, my definition admittedly comes from a mentor of mine, Dewey Freeman, who is the founder of the Gestalt Institute of the Rockies. And he says that health or wellness, because I think they're sort of interchangeable, is our capacity to choose. And I believe that that's true. That in many ways we are barricaded and blocked off from our conscious ability to choose, often because our pain is choosing for us, because our unconscious stories and unconscious patterns and unconscious beliefs and our inferiorities and our insecurities are choosing for us. And so health is our ability to choose. And when we can begin to move through a lot of those things and integrate them into our being, we have a more complete, robust ecosystem from which to choose. So that. That would be my definition of wellness.

I love your definition. Please tell people where they can play in your ecosystem. You know, where can they go? And this doesn't have to be so hard. You guys really like this? Yes. There's going to be moments where it's challenging for sure. Otherwise you wouldn't grow. But it doesn't have to be therapy and work all the time. This can be training. So where do they go to begin this? And how can they play with you and interact with you online?

Yeah, probably the easiest way is just through the website mantalks.com or you could go to connorbeaton.com and then, you know, I'm very active, both on Instagram at Man Talks or on my podcast, which is just the Man Talks podcast. Those are probably the best ways to come find me and hit me up and let me know if you have any questions after today's conversation.

I'm sure we will. So, Connor, thank you from my heart to yours, man, and from my entire community across the world for coming on Wellness for us. Really appreciate your work, man. So hands together, deep bow. And also a smile for just the challenges that we experience in this world, the challenges of fatherhood, and the beauty in the art form of podcasting. So thank you for coming on the show. Thank you.

Sam.