This is a conversational podcast episode (Wellness Force) between Connor Beaton and Josh Trent about the value of allowing psychological "falling apart" as part of growth. Connor urges men to stop chasing perpetual upward growth, face their shadow (what they've rejected or lied about), and accept the nigredo/dark night of the soul as necessary soil for mature identity (father, husband, leader). Josh underscores cultural barriers—patriarchal norms and seductive distractions—that pull men away from therapeutic training and honest emotional work. The episode combines Jungian framing, practical prompts (questions to explore), personal testimony (Connor's ~2.5-year difficult period), and a reframing of therapy as training.
Questions this video answers
Two and a half years.
Chapters
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. And no man wants to fall apart. No man wants to come into contact with the realities of what his grief might have to teach him. 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, or he's a rock star, or he's, you know, like a sports God, 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 pray, let's make this as pragmatic. Yes. 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. 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. So that's part of. That's part of the challenge that you as a man or a woman. But I'm, 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 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? The nigredo is a period of decomposition. It's a space of breaking down, of decay, of allowing things to break apart. In modern spiritual terms, we call it 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 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 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 was 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 is 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 of 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 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 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.
