What A Woman Needs From A Man In A Relationship

When you try and fix your wife, you turn her into a project, not a person. You immediately start objectifying her. Every man on the planet has been taught that emotions aren't safe.

In high school, my football coach would be like, suck it up, pussy.

Yeah, when we hold emotions inside, they come out sideways. You actually represent a threat to her nervous system, like 100%. So when you raise your voice, she may be hearing the content of what you say, but her nervous system is saying, I'm not safe. Our nervous system has returned to baseline and we actually are fine. Hers is not. You might want to have intimacy with your wife and she says no. For no real reason, and it's hard to understand as a man. My wife told me that there was times where I was sexually manipulative and we had sex and she didn't want to. She told me she would dissociate during sex because I was so not present that she would become not present, and she reacted to me not being there by also leaving the space. Containment brought to me the work I needed to do. You will cure childhood trauma. You will break ancestral chains in such a way that there will be a before and an after, as as men, we need to understand that if there's chaos, we can be the man who walks into the storm, takes a deep breath, and calms it. The most contained man in history, do you know who he is?

What is masculine containment, essentially? What is that?

So when you think of peace, what I hear is safety. And being a safe person first before anything else brings a tremendous amount of peace into your life. And I know this because I've been an unsafe person. You know, and for most of my life, I wasn't safe. I wasn't like I am now. I didn't have the same understanding of who I am. And so I felt like most of my life I had to be a warrior, and I carried a sword and used it all the time. It was like, you know, cross me and you're not going to do it again. And I carried around assassin's energy. It wasn't like, I'm gonna win this argument, I'm going to assassinate you with this argument. And What I didn't know for most of my life is that relating in that way splashed back on me just as hard as it did in the person in front of me. You know, it was a constant dysregulation and constant looking for the next fight and constant looking for the— for what am— how am I going to stay in this state of adrenal overload and hormonal overload so that I can feel like I'm alive? And what masculine containment is, is, is the opposite. It's actually understanding that as men our power doesn't come from aggression. Our power doesn't come from using force. Our power actually comes from the power of containment, of being able to feel our feelings without projecting them or weaponizing them on anyone, of being able to process and metabolize and transmute what's going on in our bodies rather than owning it as who we are. And the process of first containing ourselves— now I want to be careful with, with one of the things you said, you know, you said containing our women. It's not really that we contain them. It's that if we can step into a place of calm and regulation and presence, not suppression, but presence, and we can breathe into what's going on around us and understand that emotions aren't a threat, we can create and lead with curiosity and not judgment. We create safety for the person in front of us, but we also create dynamic safety for ourselves. And it's not a feeling of force. It's a feeling of power because, you know, the average man— actually, not the average. All of us have been taught that emotions are not safe. Like, you have, I have, every man on the planet has been taught that emotions aren't safe.

I have a core memory of in high school, my football coach would be like, suck it up, pussy. Yeah, literally. Yeah. And these phrases are like embedded in the unconscious.

I mean, they're embedded in the unconscious and conscious.

Yeah.

Because sometimes when we're doing something, we actually hear that echo of like, hey, man up, right? Don't cry. Don't feel your feelings. Like, you're being too loud. You're making everybody else uncomfortable. So I was taught constantly that emotions were unsafe. And so I learned suppression. I learned I'm going to hold it all inside. And when we hold emotions inside, they come out sideways. And for me, they came out in addiction, in compulsion, in aggression, like unplaced aggression. You know, like somebody would make a wrong turn in front of me or not use their blinker, and I would literally be ready to run them off the road. And I think a lot of men do the same thing, you know. We have this like knee-jerk reaction to go from something's happening in the world to I need to be aggressive. And it's like— and it's how we're wired as men, you know, biologically, evolutionarily. We're wired to— for threat identification, then bringing our nervous systems up to a place of high, high awareness, and then neutralization, and then we come right back to baseline. And so a lot of men do that 20 times a day, and they're constantly in this pattern of like going up into warrior energy and coming back down to baseline and warrior energy and back to that, down to baseline. And you know, and I know, it's exhausting. Yeah, it is like the most exhausting way to live.

It sucks. Yeah, yeah, it's the worst. Well, in your frameworks with the Brotherhood, we're going to put some images of you on the screen right now of like the thousands and thousands of comments that are on Alex's post. It's because you're touching on a vein like I always say that there's no bad marketing because whether people agree with you or disagree with you, at least you're having the conversation.

100%.

That's the power of what you're doing. Yet you came from a world of creating momentum and business and systems. I want to go back to that initial question because I think it's juxtaposed on what I just asked you. You made a shift, you took a sabbatical, and in that sabbatical you learned about yourself, you learned about your wife, you learned about sexuality and intimacy. And a lot of these energies that can be challenging to describe, like almost ineffable to describe. But it's just— you've synthesized it now into providing a space for literally what will be millions of men across the world. Was there multiple moments, or can you glean anything that might shorten the pain curve for men going through a similar journey where it doesn't have to be so long? Is there any wisdom in that path that you want to impart upon men and women listening where the pain curve of the awareness that you're now embodying doesn't have to be so long.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's an easy set of questions for men to answer, and, you know, I've asked you these before, but we'll go through them again just to demonstrate it and to, to kind of like go through the process. So yeah, for men, I think one of the most important things that we need to understand is that when we're in a relationship with a woman, we are not equal. And the world has tried to convince us not only that we're equal, but that men and women are the same. Yeah. And it is such a travesty. And I know I'm making a gendered argument, and I know that gendered arguments are not popular today, and I'm willing to take all the heat for doing that.

Great.

You know, I've got 2 daughters, 3 sisters. Like, this is not a 'we're better than them' argument. It's a 'we're different.' We're different, and we have to recognize our differences. Otherwise, we overlook the solutions that are sitting right in front of us. So I'll ask you the questions, Josh Trent. You know, the first one is, you and Carrie, um, Are you— is Carrie physically stronger than you?

No.

Okay. Is she more physically capable than you?

For breastfeeding, but that's— but not, not in other ways.

But physically capable as far as doing anything outside of just the act of maybe breastfeeding or having a baby, right? I'm stronger, 100%. And, and are you capable of more violence? Yeah, like no question. Yeah. And I've had— I've asked hundreds of men these questions and they all answer the same. Now, if we take them and reverse those, the opposite is also true. Like, she really can't hurt you in a hand-to-hand combat. Like, you're going to win. And one of the biggest issues that we have with— as men is that when we're in a relationship with a woman and emotions appear, we see them as a threat. And so we match emotions and we match, like, volume, we match expression. And the reality is we are reacting to something that's not present. Because if your wife doesn't represent a real threat to you, what are you reacting to? It's a threat outside of the moment. But here's the issue. Yeah, you actually represent a threat to her nervous system, like 100%. So when you raise your voice, she may be hearing the content of what you say, but her nervous system is saying, I'm not safe. And when you match her expression, she may be trying to keep up with you, but her nervous system is saying, you need to get out of here. And when you are in a conflict and you know the pattern that exists in every relationship that I've talked to so far is a simple 5-step pattern. There's a trigger, then there's escalation, then there's rupture, then there's withdraw, and then there's repair, like Gottman talks about. Mm-hmm. But it's not true. Like you and I repair, and we think everything's fine. And she might actually verbalize that she feels better and everything's fine, but what's going on behind the scenes is our nervous system has returned to baseline and we actually are fine. Hers is not. And over time, as that pattern repeats itself, what we're actually training our partner's nervous system is that we are unsafe and that we represent a threat. And so the more we train her nervous system that we represent a threat, the more there's this cascade of things that happen, Josh. Like, we walk in the room, she actually goes on alert. You might walk up to your wife and touch her, and she might bristle or jump. You might want to have intimacy with your wife, and she says no for no real reason. Like, there's no reason this shouldn't be happening, and it's hard to understand as a man. But when she's in that state of nervous system reaction, you know, it's like fight, flight, fawn, or freeze. If we are repeating the pattern that I just pointed out over and over again, our nervous system returns to baseline. Hers is wired for protection and for safety, not for threat neutralization. Hers is wired literally to keep the baby alive, whether she has a baby or not. That's evolutionarily how women are wired. It's to create safety and to create security. And so if we repeat this pattern over and over again, we actually start creating a reaction in her body that lasts until we do it again. And lasts until we do it again. And so she's almost in a constant state of reaction, of vigilance, of protection. The most heartbreaking messages that I get these days, and I get them all the time, I mean, I could open my phone and read 10 of them, are from women who say, just first DM I get from them, it's like, Alex, your content is speaking to me. It's showing me there's a totally different path here, and it's showing me why I still love my husband so much, and he's my person, and he's my everything. But when it comes to getting close to him, my body says no. God, I'm getting a little emotional talking about it because that was present in my relationship. I created that pattern, and my wife started getting more sensitive and more closed and more reactive to me, and I felt it. It was so uncomfortable, Josh. To have this woman that at the beginning of our relationship leaned into me, like literally laid on top of me, wanted to be around me all the time. And I remember walking up to her in the kitchen and like grabbing her and knowing it wasn't okay, and knowing that she loved me, but there was this thing that had come in between us, and having this absolute confusion and frustration around it. And I went through all the emotions that men go through. I was mad. That, like, she wasn't, like, doing what she said. That she said she loved me, but she's not acting like she loved me. Then I was confused, like, how is this really working? Then I slowed down. I really slowed down, and I started asking her questions. And there was a point— it's like the turning point in my life. It's why I do the work that I do today. We're in a quiet moment and not in a reaction. Katie said, I need you to understand something. I don't feel seen. I don't feel heard. I don't feel safe. And if something doesn't change, I'm not gonna be able to do this anymore. And Josh Trent, like, I have full body chills just saying it because in that moment I was like, holy shit, this is real. Like, this is real. This is real for her. She doesn't feel safe. She doesn't feel seen. Like, there's something that I'm doing here that is not okay. And it put me first into a spiral of blame and shame and self-doubt and thinking like, I know she's the most important thing in my world. How am I affecting this in her? How am I making her say those things? And thank God that in that moment when I felt into it, it wasn't like a threat of her leaving me at that time. You know, it was an opportunity. She was giving me an opportunity. And it was the most gracious thing she's ever done. Because it was a reckoning. It was a reckoning with who I was. And it was a reckoning with how I was showing up. And it was a reckoning with the person I thought I was. And I realized that there was something that was completely and totally off in my behavior. And I went on a mission to find it. And I knew I had to rectify this because Katie's the most important thing in my entire life. You know, I dedicate my life to her because she is like— I say my parents gave me life. Katie showed me how to build a life. And I didn't know before her. I didn't understand what life was all about. And so when I was having that effect on her, it was so unsettling that it dropped me into this place of introspection and this place of— honestly, a place of possibility. Like, if what I'm doing right now isn't working, what is the possible way that I can behave, or the possible way that I can show up so that my wife never says anything like that again? And I'm one of those people that believes that big problems can have really simple solutions. And my whole life I've proved that. Every company I've ever run has been a movement, and every company I've ever run has taken a complex problem and provided a simple solution, and that simple solution has changed people's lives.

There's so much in what you just shared, brother. Thank you for sharing that so much. Sure. I've heard you share parts of that, but I know we all can feel that because the reality is that myself, and I would say most married men, if you had to guess and put a percentage, it's probably 75 to 90% of married men that are struggling with even understanding what containment is.

No, brother, I think it's like 99.9%. Great.

Okay, so yeah, the far majority of men, yeah, are— have heard this phrase, and we talked about it with Teal Swan a little bit. She touched on it, which is why I was so excited to bring you on the show. I mean, full stop, like, I'm excited to bring you on the show just because you're a great friend. And we've shared so much together in hiking and sessions. And so I really get value. And I know we all get value from someone that's able to share their own vulnerabilities, for sure, such that you have. So I want to go back to that for a little bit more wisdom, because you could have chosen based on familial wounds or unconscious patterns or, you know, unconscious beliefs, You could have said, you know what, Katie's too much, and like, this whole thing is too much. I'm just going to focus on work, which would inherently be a fuel source of wounding that you'd be making that decision from.

100%.

Yet you had the awareness and/or the maturity. I don't know. I do my best on this podcast to try to put words to the ineffable.

Yeah.

But yet some moments like that, a decision point where when your wife brings forth, I'm going to leave, I can't do this anymore. If you continue to behave in this way, you're at this fork in the road. And a lot of men are at this fork in the road all the time. And that fork in the road through their beautiful wives, it may last a year, 5 years, 10 years where she keeps saying, we're at the fork, we're right here. If something doesn't change, like, I've got to go. But she loves him so much. But he's in such pattern. We are going to give space in the podcast to talk about the women's responsibility and roles. For sure. Because that's valid. I know a lot of men may be even triggered. I know I have been triggered. By this concept of containment and understanding how Josh contains himself first.

Yeah.

And then brings that level of maturity to a marriage or relationship. So the question is, if you've ever blown up your life for no logical reason, congratulations, your biology works. You're not broken. You're just running an old pattern. After 10 years of podcasting and interviewing 800+ of the sharpest minds and deepest hearts on planet Earth, I built something simple to help you interrupt these patterns fast. I kept running personally into the same stuff, and audience members would write to me and say, Josh, I'm dealing with the same core 3 things which are expressed through emotional epigenetics that are our emotional patterns, our unconscious beliefs, and our environment. This Self-Liberation Blueprint is a free training where you get clear on how these 3 areas are blocking your life, and in 10 days you can move from being stuck and distorted on the inside to clear and on purpose on the outside. The Self-Liberation Blueprint is a 10-day jumpstart that's perfect for the human being that feels stuck, but they just can't figure out why. Now, I built this with no smoke and mirrors. I know in our world there's a lot of smoke and mirrors when it comes to personal growth and spiritual development. I built this with 24 years of my own health, wellness, and personal development life experience so I can save you money and save you time and start getting your results as quickly as possible. On your first day, you're going to go right into a self-assessment where we know exactly where you are and exactly where you get to be. We're going to take you through a dream vision process and specific breathwork to create your life vision that you desire in the future as if it's here right now. All of this is free because I'm here to give it to you as a mentor in the same way that my mentors gave it to me. It is purely just my gift to you. You also get free access to the Liberated Life Tribe, a community of people like you and I that are actually doing the inner work instead of just pretending that they're fine. By the time you're done, you're going to know exactly where you are in your Wellness Pentagon— physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and financially— and you're going to have a map, a mindful action plan to move from clarity instead of distortion. This is not therapy for people that are broken. You're not broken, you're just bioenergetically burdened. And I'm here to tell you that removing these burdens is possible, and I believe you can do it. You don't need fixing. You just get to have a clear starting point and a plan that actually works with your biology. If you're ready to move forward with your life without forcing it, join me inside the Self-Liberation Blueprint by heading over to liberatedlife.com. Come join us. The question is, when you were in that fork with Katie, what was it? What was it inside of you that said, you know what, I'm aware of my own wounds, I'm aware of my own stuff, but I'm not going to let that be evidence as to why this won't work out.

Yeah, I, I truly believe it was divine intervention, Josh.

It was the presence of God.

It was the presence of God, and it was also the work that we did with, like, the most miraculous medicine I've ever used, ayahuasca. And, um, we did a series of ceremonies in December 2023, right before Christmas, like, after we had our first podcast together.

Yeah.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah, in retrospect, like, how Nuts, was it, to go into ceremonies, I think on the 21st of December. And they were intense. It was where we were really working on our relationship and what was going on between the two of us.

Yeah.

And I came out of that ceremony, and just to give people context, like, one of the challenges that was really present in my relationship was objectification of women. I was trained from a young age that objectification was what we did as men. And so I used pornography. I had a wandering eye— like, not wandering eye, I had a, like, analytical eye. Every time I walked into a room, I'm sizing every woman up. I'm also sizing up men for, like, safety and protection. But it was like objectification mixed in with all of this conditioning. And we came out of that series of ceremonies a few days before Christmas, and I was in the worst place I've ever been. I was like feeling so compulsive that walking to the car, Katie was like, how are you? And I said, I think I'm worse than I've ever been. I'm feeling so compulsive. I'm like, I was at the point where I was telling her everything. And that's not how it was in our whole marriage. But there was this point where I'm like, okay, transparency, everything needs to come out. I told my friends, I told everybody around me, like, I'm working through this objectification thing. I'm trying to give up a lifelong habit of porn that started when I was 8 years old and really shouldn't be there. And I told her, like, this is worse than I've ever been. And, and like, I— we went out to the car, we went home, and I was in suffering for days. It was, I think, the 21st when we got out of the ceremonies, and we went through Christmas. And Christmas Day was like my worst Christmas ever. I couldn't pay attention, I couldn't feel, my body was in like tons of reactions. It was all I could do to like just show up for my kids and for Katie. And then I went back upstairs and I did time in neutral, and I spent time on my own, and I'm like, I really need to figure this out. And what happened was the morning of December 26th, I got up and started journaling everything that had come through in the ceremony. And I remembered this message that every day is a ceremony and your life is that important. I'm like, okay, I need to sit with that message. Like, what does that actually mean? Because I don't get it. And what came through was that I needed to set up a daily ceremony a daily time for me and Katie. Not with medicine, not every day, but a daily time for the two of us to sit down. And the message I got was my only objective was to hold my center. And I'm like, what does that even mean? Like, I have to hold my center? So I walked around our house and it was the weirdest experience because I'm like, I'm gonna set up a ceremony space in our bedroom. And I walked around my house and there was all these things that I had bought, like, at different times, and they were just there. And I'm like, oh, that's for the ceremony space, that's for this. This is so weird, like, I'm collecting it around the house. And so I set up this space for Katie and I, and we went upstairs and sat down, and I said, hey, we're going to do this every day. This is what's coming through with the medicine. I need your time every day, and I'm going to invite you to this daily. And I said, and I don't even know where it came from, I'm like, I know our relationship has been hard. I need you to tell me about it. And as the words were leaving my mouth, I'm like, oh my God, this is not going to be easy. Because what my wife proceeded to tell me was all the times that I had trespassed and overstepped and manipulated and coerced. And I couldn't deny a thing she said, Josh. I wanted to. There was this part of me, this like very, very active part of me that wanted to say, that's not what I meant, and you shouldn't take it that way, and that's not how I see it. And there was a defense for everything. But what I realized, like, in that moment is that I was hearing her truth, not mine, hers. And over the course of days of us doing that and her telling me like really what happened to our relationship, It went from the first night, which, brother, I'll be so honest with you, like, I'd love to say that I was like, like, you know, in it and I was crushing it and doing so well. Dude, I was white-knuckling.

Of course.

I thought I was gonna die. Like, I actually had the thought, like, could I die from this? Uh, and that sounds irrational, like, could I die from a conversation? Sure. But dude, it was so present in my body, I was actually like monitoring my heart to see if it was gonna stop, because what I heard was so painful and so confronting and so true. I couldn't deny it. And so I listened to her, and I listened to her tell me all of the challenges that she had had in our relationship. And that first night, I'm like, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die. Breathe so you don't die. And what happened was the relationship had an arc. It like— or sorry, the conversation had an arc. It went up to a level of intensity that I hadn't ever experienced with my wife before. No matter what fight we were in, I had never experienced the body reactions and the feeling of instability and the feeling of reckoning. Like, that's the word. It was a feeling of reckoning. Like, holy cow. Like, I'm really finally understanding this. And I asked her questions like, is there anything else you need to tell me? And how does that feel? And how did that feel? And I said things like, Katie, I'm so sorry. I can't deny that. And that's valid. And I can't believe that ever happened to you. I want you to tell me more so that it never does again. And as I sat there and listened, the conversation went up to a peak, and then I kept asking questions, and it came down energetically. I could feel it coming down, and I'm like, okay, man, you're not gonna die. And when she got to a place when she stopped— where she stopped talking, I said, is there anything else you need to tell me? And she said no. And I said, are you sure? And it started right back up again. And I'm like, okay, this is part of the process. Like, I feeling it. And I think that first night, 3 or 4 times I said, are you— is there anything else you need to tell me? Are you sure? And she said no, right? And then finally I said, is there anything else you need to tell me? And she's like, no, I'm good. And Josh, I realized in that moment that up until that point in our relationship— we've been together 22 years, and not at that point, today we've been together 22 years. I think it was 20 years then. I'm terrible with dates, maybe 19. And what I realized was I had spent our entire marriage in every conflict we ever had, inventorying everything I needed to fix and every process I needed to build and every resentment I was feeling and all of these challenges. And I was like frenetic afterwards. And when I said, is there anything else we need to do after this? You know, she said— I asked her, is there anything else you need to tell me? No. Is there anything else we need to do? And she said no. And I, in that moment, I'm like, Holy crap, like, I've spent my whole marriage fixing, and with this activity, this meta program of like, it's never gonna happen again, I'm gonna fix everything, I'm gonna make everything better. And all I had to do was see her and validate her and hear her. And in that moment, I'm like, I'm doing this every day. And we did it night after night, and I heard more, and each night it was different, but it was interesting. Because I think it was the 4th or 5th night, I had this feeling when we were done, when she was, she was calm and I had remained contained and I had remained curious. I had this feeling in my body of like, dude, I can handle anything. Like, this is intense, but I can handle anything. Like, I can do this. Like, this is the key to our relationship, because no matter what comes up, all I need to do is validate her, hear her, see her, and it's changing who I am in the moment. You know, when I think of her words washing over me, Josh Trent, what I now know they were doing is they were stripping away anything who I wasn't, and they were stripping away anything that wasn't my essence, and they were stripping away all of the masking and creation I had done around being some person that I really wasn't. They were humbling me at a level that I don't think I'd ever been humbled. I know I had never been humbled before.

Thank you so much for that. Y'all rewind that and play it again. What was the exact moment in your journey of creating Momentum for Entrepreneurs that you realized, oh my God, the missing link is containment, the missing link is masculine and feminine understanding of self?

You know, Josh, I don't know that there was a moment. I think it was more of a progression. So, you know, I coached entrepreneurs for a long time. And what I saw over and over again, especially in the entrepreneurs where they were working with their spouse, was that they could create tremendous success in business. But oftentimes when it came to their relationship, they were suffering. And oftentimes the momentum in the business dictated the momentum in the relationship. And I knew there was a way to, like, separate that.

Yeah.

You know, it was one of the most challenging things we watched is that if the business wasn't doing well, neither was the relationship. And if the relationship was— if the business was doing well, then the relationship had a chance. But often there was this massive disconnect there. And the better they did, the more they struggled. And it wasn't just those who were in a relationship running a business together. What I often found was successful entrepreneur with just broken relationships all the way around them. And that's not success. You know, I often say there's— I know so many people who are so poor, all they have is money. And that's— I saw that over and over again with, you know, men and women who had success but a feeling of like vacancy and a feeling of not really experiencing that success and not really stepping into it because they knew that something was off and something was wrong.

Yeah, we dropped in pretty deep and you said, you know, the goal is to live life as a ceremony, right? That's the goal. Not that it's the there there, because I think when you think you're living in ceremony, God will bring you a new one. Sure. And so I love that because being, being wealthy but feeling vacant, having a hole in one's heart maybe, or definitely in one's awareness. Yeah. It can create this false sense of success. It can create a prison where one can— like our fellow friend George Bryant, who we both know, I'm thinking of him right now. And even myself currently with where I am, there's parts of my business and life that I feel like I've created a prison for myself. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs and men go through this where the greatest way to live ceremony and the greatest barometer for my business is actually right there at my house. With my wife and my children, yet I paradoxically focus so much on the fulfillment of the business that it steal— it almost steals my life force energy. I allow it to unconsciously. I become asleep. Can you speak to that, this asleepness that many men feel, that many women feel, that many women write to you about with your movement? Now there's millions and millions of views that you're experiencing on Instagram and Facebook. I think you said on our hike yesterday, 4 or 5 million views. Yeah, in a month. So there's obviously a platform you're touching a nerve of something. And I'm juxtaposing my nerve that's being touched too, where I focus so much on the business, I focus so much on the expansion of this podcast and this movement, that the paradox is that if I just focus at home and do what's necessary at home to, to be a man who contains, then paradoxically my business would grow. Can you expand on that? I know you have a lot of experience with that conversation.

Yeah, you know, I think what happens for a lot of people who are in business is that the success becomes a judgment. You say prison, but I say judgment. You know, I have a podcast on my old Momentum podcast that I haven't recorded in a while, but did for, I think, 8 years and 900-something episodes. And it's called When Money's Not Enough, or When Money Becomes a Judgment. Because if you're stacking up money in the bank, and you still feel like you're not a day-to-day success, it's like, hey, I've made it, I've been there, you know, I'm doing this. And that money actually starts to feel heavy, it starts to feel like, you know, like What, what is enough? What is going to make me finally feel better about myself?

Yeah.

And oftentimes it's slowing down, you know, stepping into stillness and creating priorities. And I think for all of us, the priority should be our relationship with our higher power. That's like one. Our relationship with ourselves, which is so crucially important and so many people really neglect and don't step into. And then our relationship with our significant other, our spouse, our family. And when we focus on those three relationships, they become the foundation to do whatever we want in the world. And so often it's like, I'll do that later and I'm gonna grow a business. And the business— I've done this, I was very successful at growing businesses in my life. And so often I would grow a business to a point where it was thriving as a business, but I wasn't. And I got to the point where I shut businesses down, like successful companies. I was just like, one day to the next, I can't do this anymore. More than once. And it was because I lost focus on that framework of me and my relationship with God, and me and my relationship with myself, and my relationship with Katie, and, and like my family. And if you, if you use that as the lens through which you do everything, it just changes how you show up, and it changes the choices you make. And those choices that you make may go slower, you know, may slow things down, and it may bring a different level of introspection. But when you have that slower stance, you know, in the Brotherhood, we always say slow is fast and fast is slow. It's a law of pace. Because when we're going too fast, we make mistakes and we miss things. And, you know, I think the majority of entrepreneurs, and really the majority of people, are in such a frenetic speed, sped-up pace, and trying to get to somewhere so fast that they're running by intuition, they're running by inspiration, you know, they might say a prayer in the morning, but then they accept God for the rest of the day. It's like, I'm gonna say the prayer and go do my thing. But if you slow down, the intuition, the inspiration, the messages are there constantly. We just don't hear 'em 'cause we're going too fast.

There's this false dichotomy that I've fallen into that I think many men and women can relate to of like, I can't have success in health, wealth, relationships, intimacy unless I struggle and hustle. But then there's this other false dichotomy piece that says, just allow, just relax and do nothing, brother. There's a Goldilocks between— what do you believe the Goldilocks is between efforting as a man? Let's speak directly to heteronormative relationships.

Let's do it.

It expresses in all ways, but let's speak to the men's hearts. There, there's this side of hustle and honestly kind of like a marketing dogma. It just feels so— it's like Gary Vaynerchuk and all these hustle, grind, 2 in the morning. There's that, and then there's this other world of spiritual poo-poo, spiritual woo-woo crap. What's the Goldilocks in between efforting and it only feels good when I do it? So good vibes only, brother. What's the middle of that?

You know, I think when we, when we take any equation to the extremes, you're going to find the most unhealthy and challenged individuals at the extreme. And so if it's at the extreme of the only way to do anything is hustle and kill myself, like when I look at the entrepreneurial world, often it looks like a world where pain is like congratulated, and hustle and checking out and being like disassociated that you're working so hard is like the goal.

Yeah.

And on the spiritual side, it's often like, I'm gonna do nothing and the world's gonna change around me. And that, that too is just going to keep you stuck in place. And I think if you bring those together and you determine where it is you want to go out of stillness, not out of speed, not out of aggression, not out of like, I'm gonna do everything all at once and right away, but you slow down and you understand where it is you want to end up. And I don't mean a 1-year goal or a 2-year goal. I mean, like, where is my life actually going? What type of impact do I want to have? What type of human do I want to have? And keeping that resonant so that in your day-to-day decisions, you can have the confidence that, like, this is where I'm going, and you can slow things down. And I lived in that hustle culture, Josh Trent. Like, I was good at it. You know, I was really good at destroying myself. In my 20s, I grew a multimillion-dollar, multi-location international consultancy. And I worked 14-hour days, 7 days a week. And I would take like a day off.

Brutal.

Well, yeah, I mean, it seems like it's brutal. But at the time, I didn't understand that. It was just what I thought I had to do. And I was so terrified of not having success. I was running from a lack of success. I was running from very humble beginnings from a family that didn't have a lot of money, from, you know, a lot of choices were dictated by what we didn't have, not what we had. And so I was trying to get away from that as fast as I could, and I did monetarily. But I was in a place where I had a business that became my life instead of a business that facilitated a life. And when I met Katie when I was 30, thank God, such a divine meeting and such a divine union. I decided I didn't want to do it anymore. And within a few months, I wrapped up my business, I sold off what I could, I made some money and like moved out of it and really started prioritizing my life, life differently and started prioritizing her and our relationship and like, what was this going to be about? And since then, my life's dramatically improved. Like, there's been no perfection. I want to make that clear. Like so many mistakes and so many challenges. But prioritizing Katie is really how I found myself. And prioritizing Katie is really how I met God. You know, I think a lot of people say, oh, well, you have to lean into God and then, then your relationship. For me, it was a reverse. My relationship showed me there was a God.

And by the way, immediately share this podcast if you're a man who's struggling with inherently being a man, because let's be real, we weren't taught this. No, there's no 101 containment in high school.

No, or the opposite.

Or in college, right? The entire societal paradigm, actually, I'll just say this, the hooks of modernity come in so strong. All the hooks are essentially distortions or distractions from the peace that you brought forth by just being with your wife and asking her questions. Yeah, that's a very focused, beautiful state where there can be true connection and understanding. Yet, to the degree I'm just reflecting right here live on the podcast, to the degree that I've allowed myself to become distracted, to be off purpose, to be pulled by pornography, because I've had a huge journey with pornography, as I've shared. I see those as places that I allow myself to go when I'm afraid to feel what's happening in me now. It's the places that I don't want— I don't want to feel in Josh Trent. Abandonment, fear, self-hatred, fear of my wife sharing so much about how I'm a failure.

Yeah.

That I won't be able to survive because in my neural system it may truly feel that way. So when you're sharing that, I'm like, yep, checkmark.

Yeah.

So here's the question. There's all these hooks, there's all these distractions, and some of these distractions are coping mechanisms for us as men who had a mother who in my case was bipolar or had an absent father or had very a construct of familial patterning that wounded us so deeply that we time travel and bring those wounds to our wife and we show up with those wounds. And then when she reminds us in any way of the past by just her being a woman and emoting, I— we tend to shut down. We tend to go into those distractions even deeper because we're so afraid of what might be felt in that moment of realness that she's bringing forth. Where do we begin to unravel the coping, the conditioning, the distraction? That I'm talking to you about as men, such that we can then be in a space of not holding it, but just being in the space with her. What does the unraveling look like in the beginning?

I mean, I think first we have to name the pattern, you know. And I think what happens is you, you just said we shut down. But if you really look at it, and I'll just speak from a personal experience, when Katie's emotions were present in any way, like if I walked into a room and she was crying, my first thought was, we need to change this. Like, this isn't okay.

You gotta fix it.

You gotta fix it, right? Yeah. And so I would go into fix it, right? And 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 gonna 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 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 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.

Mm-hmm.

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 Kiley 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. It's still in the space.

Yeah.

So 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 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, Wyatt, 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 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.

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

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 what'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, 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, uh, 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 it 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. And so it's, it's a totally different lived experience than you and I have.

What was coming up for me when you were sharing was like 5 things, but I'll talk about one. The, the one thing that I was feeling coming out, it was like it started in my solar plexus and then it went to my throat It's this lived experience that I've had with my mother and my father. And there's a gentleman that I'm most likely going to have on the show. His name is Joe Hudson. And I don't know if you've seen his work or not, but he says that, you know, when you argue for your limitations, people believe you.

And you can keep them.

And when they believe you, then you have the excuse to essentially be right about your limitations. And so I could sit here on this podcast and I could argue with you about all the ways that I believe my wife has limitations. I could argue for her limitations as an excuse unconsciously for me to not do my work. I'm gonna not do that. Instead, what I'm gonna say is what I asked you before. There is a Goldilocks zone. And this is the question that I think is on a lot of men's hearts and minds, because at the core of this question, there's a man either opening his heart to potentially feeling all the things or there's a man guarding his heart and further going into those distortions and distractions and not being with his woman. That fear that I'm describing to you, you know, forget everything and run. I think I've heard fear. I think it's for everyone's attention responsibly. Fear is not— I love acronyms and processes just like you do. And I love— I actually made this up on my own because I was like, okay, I get the, I get the forget everything and run. I understand that. Like, there's rational fear and there's irrational fear. I promise I'll get to the question because this is a really important way for me to talk this through. Like, this is my animus, or my— this is my anima just, just expressing to you, right? Like, my, my female energy that wants to expand into this understanding. So I go into moments with my wife where I feel so afraid of rejection, I feel so afraid of irrational fear, really, it's irrational. Because there's, there's actually nothing for me to be afraid of. I'm inherently time traveling and projecting my wounds onto her in that moment. Yet there's like such a sacred place for me to not put my safety as her responsibility. But for her to still respect the fact that I have a child in me that deserves care and softness. Just like the young girl in her deserves radical amounts of love and care and softness. What I'm saying is, where is the sweet spot of this between holding masculine containment and being okay with anything and everything that our wife or woman brings to us? Yet still, there is a child inside of us as men, a little boy, a teenager, however you want to describe it, that also deserves that same type of tenderness and that same type of care without outsourcing it to her. Where is the sweet spot in this?

It's just different, Josh. It's fundamentally different because what you just said— so here's a comment or a question that I get all the time on social media. Yeah, it's a super challenging question and it upsets me every time. I have to like, I have to like breathe when I read it because it goes something like this. I've been with my husband, insert number of years, 10, 8, 15, 25 years. And I've never felt safe. And, and I didn't know it at the beginning of our relationship, but I know now that I really don't feel safe. So Alex, what can I do as a woman to create safety in my relationship with a husband that continues to react and continues to raise his voice and continues to, to trigger me and make me feel unsafe? And Josh Trent, the unfortunate answer is there's not a lot she can do, really. I tell women that what they need to do is give her husband— give their husband an ultimatum as clearly and directly as they can. Bring them to the reckoning. Because her working on herself, her calming her nervous system, her doing whatever she needs to do or feels like she should do, there's predictable outcomes to that. She can work on herself as much as she wants, and if her husband's making her feel unsafe, this is a nervous system to nervous system issue. This is an evolutionary biology issue. Like, we could explain the science, but it gets kind weird and boring. But the reality is that threat is going to persist. She might be able to regulate herself against it. She might be able to find some tools that make it easier, but that threat is still going to be present. And the reality is, is she can't stop you from reacting because she's smaller than you. She can't physically hold you down. She can't— like, there's nothing she's going to do to influence except for giving the ultimatum. And so I often tell women, like, if you're in that situation, the most gracious thing you can do is find a quiet moment and explain to your husband exactly how it feels, because that's his work. That's the work he needs to do before any other work in the relationship occurs. He has to contain himself, because if you're in an environment of non-safety, if a woman goes to do work— and this is what happened in our relationship— Katie would go to therapy over me. Not over her childhood wounding, not over the trauma she experienced. She would go to therapy around me, and therapists do not understand this dynamic. It's, it's like so challenging because therapists are in a medical, you know, uh, like Big Pharma world. It's part of it. It's like an offshoot of the DSM-5 and the DSM-4 and all this other stuff that is really set up so that we can get prescription drugs. And therapists are taught men and women are the same and we should treat them the same and we should treat them as equals in a relationship. And so oftentimes couples go to therapy where it's a couple and it's a safe space to express, and the woman expresses and then the man matches and goes above her and expresses in this safe space, and he's doing the right thing and the therapist is nodding along with him. But the reality is he is going this way towards a therapist He's outsourced leadership to a third party. He's in a massive reaction, and her nervous system feels every second, and it's inventorying whether she wants to or not, and it's shutting down whether she wants to or not, and it's feeling a, a level of actual life-or-death fear whether she wants to or not. And so the first step in finding what the work is, is when we as men step into containment and we feel a reaction happening over and over again, that's our work. I can share one very personally. So I've sat in ceremony every single day with Katie, except for some days where she was traveling, we had to do it in text or talking on the phone. But whenever we've been home, we've been in a ceremony every day since December 26, 2023. And there's been times where even though I'm in a place of containment, outside of that ceremony, I'm having reactions that don't make sense. But because I'm contained, I'm actually feeling them now. I'm not stuffing them down. I'm, you know, containment is not suppression. Containment is actually feeling emotions without weaponizing them and feeling emotions without projecting them. And so one of the things that started coming up in our relationship, which had been present forever, but I didn't feel it, I just thought it was like this reaction or protection, was that when Katie was gone, it was really hard for me. If she was going to take a trip or be away from the house, like I would kind of go into withdraw, and I would feel completely vacant and like I wasn't present. And I had a hard time just staying in my body when she wasn't there. And for the longest time, I didn't recognize that. I just recognized it as like, oh, I'm jealous she's gone, or I'm frustrated she's gone. And it would come out sideways, and it would look controlling, and I'm sure it looked so narcissistic. Like, I know I had those patterns. And when we started sitting in our ceremony and I started not weaponizing my emotions, what I realized was like, hey, there's something here that's like not present because I shouldn't be panicked about her going to Dallas for 2 days. And I started sitting in meditation. I did EMDR therapy. I got into a lot of stillness. I looked at my life history, and what I realized was when I was a baby, only a few days old in Mexico— I was born in 1972 in Mexico— and I was born with a condition called pyloric stenosis that was just discovered like a few years before I was born. And it's where the pyloric valve in the stomach doesn't close, and so you can't take on nutrition. They can't feed you with a tube. There's no way for you to get nutrition into your body. So I was born, lost my half my body weight, and they thought I was going to die. And miraculously, there was a doctor who had come up to the States to train, come back to Mexico probably within 24 hours or 48 hours of me expiring, and he looked at me and said, this kid's got pyloric stenosis, let's take him into surgery. So they did. They cut me open here, they made a transverse cut and like operated on my stomach, and that's why I lived. Now the fallout is that— of that is that in the '70s and really up until like mid to late '80s, they didn't use anesthesia on babies. They didn't think babies could feel.

Damn. Yeah, so it's like they didn't think babies could feel.

That belief system—

get the fuck out of here—

that belief system persisted in the, in the modern world until the mid-'80s. And so I had a surgery on my abdomen. And then afterwards, in order to not be infected, I was put in a box with no human touch for days. And so I had this abandonment wound that was exceptional, like, so challenging. And so because it kept coming up, I took it to my meditation. I took it to EMDR therapy. Instead of avoiding it, I started feeling it. I ended up one day doing a hero's dose of mushrooms because I knew it was like I needed the neuroplasticity to go through this. And instead of like going into the mushrooms and letting them guide me, I like, I went in with an objective. I'm going to, to, to use this medicine to open a state of neuroplasticity and find that inner part of me that is disassociated and frustrated and scared and really like life or death terrified. And I was able to do it and come out of it. And now, like, I don't love when my wife is gone, but there's also times where she's leaving and I'm like, oh, this gives me uninterrupted time to work on what I need to work on. And the first time that I had that feeling of like, Katie's going to be gone and I'm kind of excited about what I'm going to do, I was conflicted. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, does this mean I don't love her anymore?

It's like a new identity.

Yeah, it's like, does this mean there's something wrong? And what I recognized was I was like, no, man, like, this is totally natural. Time apart creates polarity. It actually creates attraction. And so I went from like almost 2 decades in my marriage of not wanting her to not be near me, like obsessively and compulsively, to now seeing the opportunity in time apart. And so containment brought to me the work I needed to do.

That last sentence, can you say that one more time?

That containment brought to me the work I needed to do.

Let's all just feel that for a moment.

Yeah. That's just one example, Josh. There's been more.

I love it because this is, this is at the core of my next question. So once, once we go on a path of, I guess you could call it awakening, one could call it spiritual development, personal development of any kind.

How about revealing?

Once you have really revealing, once you really commit as a human being to that path, there's no going back.

No. Well, there is. There's people who go down that path and then run from it.

I've never met one of them. If you have, cool.

Oh, I definitely have.

Well, for them, God bless. But I think for the majority, I sense, and I'm curious how you feel about this, I sense that I'll just speak from my own lived experience. Once I see what's possible in other people's marriages, in other people's finances, right? Like Tony Robbins says, and I don't agree with everything Tony Robbins says. I really don't. I think a lot of what he says, I'm just like, that's actually not true.

No.

But this part was really cool. Reductionistically, he said that success leaves clues. So yes, you can model other people, but the journey that you go on specifically for us as men to contain and to learn about masculine containment, it's a fucking Trojan horse, Alex. It's a Trojan horse for the deepest spiritual and personal work you'll ever do. Because once we commit to that path and we really commit, like we burn the boats and there is no going back— I'm speaking to those people. So the other people exist, but I'm speaking to those people. Once we really commit to that, we have to be willing to go through many expansions and contractions, or as, as Kelly Brogan would say, many of the spirals of expansion and contraction where we thought we might have healed something, but it comes back full force. And I'm living proof of this with what I shared with you yesterday. And there's a lot of things in my life that I think I've healed or I think I've dealt with. But to the degree that I'm either in containment with myself and my wife and shit and what she's reflecting back to me, God, this is hard for me to admit. It's like my whole body is like tensing up.

There's a tremendous amount of resistance to actually admitting the truth.

The truth. The truth. So I think that the story that I run many times when it comes to containment, and this is the question: how do we as men know that we've provided enough containment? I see a lot of men that are doing their absolute best, and their women might say something to them like, you need to grow up, you're a child. You're being a little baby. Just really hurtful, crazy things where the man is actually going deep into doing the best that he can to be contained, to provide containment. So here's the question: how does a man know when enough containment has been set forth? Is there a metric for this? Is there a felt sense? Is there an understanding of like what, what the woman's perception of safety is? Versus his responsibility to examine and create? What is the difference between the two? How does he know that he's provided containment? And how would he know that it's actually her projecting her stuff onto him? It's a very complex thing.

Yeah, well, a couple things. Um, I'm pretty sure Napoleon Hill said success leaves clues. I'm not going to let you hang that on Tony Robbins.

Great. Well, I don't know if you saw, there's, there's some stuff about Napoleon now where it's like he's on in Everybody's a fucking mess.

Well, that's why I said— when you said— when you— when you— I mean, I just want to clarify something that I, I kind of interrupted with you, you with, and I'm sorry, I didn't mean it.

No, it's good. We're friends, we can just interrupt each other. But well, yeah, to a point.

Yeah, I just— I don't want to ever throw you off, off your game because you're so good at this. But there's a lot of people who go down a spiritual path, Josh, and they weaponize it, and they use spiritual language to excuse their behavior and they use spirituality to bypass and not actually do the work. And so there's— when you said, you know, I don't know anyone who's gone down that path and then gone in the wrong direction, I actually know people who've gone down that path and taken the wrong direction with them on the path.

Sure.

And so I think that needs to be called out because so much of what's spiritual today is really bypassing and not admitting and not taking responsibility. You know, the everyone's on their path, I'm on my journey. There's so many excuses that we make around spirituality when what we really have to do is say, like, what is my work? And so I think the question you're asking is— the question you asked was, how does a man know he's provided enough containment? And it's such a goal-oriented question because there is no such thing. This is a state of being. It's not a goal you achieve where I've done enough. This is who you become. And for some men, they're going to hear me and run from it. But here's what I know. In my heart. I mean, I can feel it right now, connecting through the grid of men around the world that are going to hear this, and they're going to say, like, this is the path I want to be on. I want to reveal who I really am, not become somebody else. I want to strip away all the things that aren't who I am and aren't really me, and I want to step into this place of containment, of peace, of, of power, of clean masculine energy, which by the way is one of the most healing forces in the world. And I watch it every single week in the Brotherhood where these guys get together with each other and they validate each other, they see each other, and in that moment they are healing, they are shifting and becoming an entirely— actually, it's not entirely different person, they are becoming who they've always been. Before the trauma, before the masking, before the challenges that they've had, the conditioning they've taken on. They're revealing who they actually are. And I think so much of personal development is becoming something different. What if we just looked at it differently and reductively and said, what if we strip away everything that we're not and we actually let ourselves show through? One of the most powerful medicine ceremonies I was ever in I went into with the— I don't set intentions with ayahuasca anymore. She's so much more intelligent than I am. I just tell her, show me what I need to see and tell me who I— tell me what I need to hear and, and help me be of service. But then I was setting intentions, and the intention was I want to know who I need to become and to, to do the work I need to do. Like, how do I make the biggest impact? How do I improve my marriage? How do I, I make, you know, stabilize my relationship with my kids so I can go from being a father to when they were young. They're now 16 and 19. And how do I transition to being a friend and advisor and a confidant? And the message I got back from the medicine is, you already are the person you're trying to become. And I heard it and I wanted to deny it because I wanted to say like, no, there's work to be done, and, and there's so much I need to do, and, and I have this frenetic energy towards becoming better. And then I I just laid there, and the medicine respects stillness. So I let stillness come through, and I had this realization that, like, if I just drop off all of the things that aren't me, that I will come through. And there's nothing that needs to be added, there's nothing that needs to be tacked on, there's no identity I have to accept. That in dropping all of it, I could actually step through and become the man that I've always been. And since I did that, the impact I've had on those around me is both felt and seen and understood and heard in a totally different way.

Thank you for that emotion. It's so, it's so valid and so sacred. How does Katie hold that part of you that was feeling those tears?

Well, I think, you know, one of the questions you've, you've kind of inferred and asked is like, what is her work? Right.

We could call it work, or we could call it just her sacred way of being, or her responsibility.

Like, what is—

we could use whatever term. It's just like, hey, a union is a union because there's two.

So there's such a difference today in when I get emotional around my wife as there's ever been in the past, because one, she feels fully seen and heard. And, you know, over— I, I told you how long we've been doing ceremony, and And, you know, as there was more peace provided, as she was seen and heard more, and she was— I had the felt sense of like actually being validated and knew I understood her. Like, I asked enough questions where I really understood her. Josh Trent, it's given me a total different frame on every woman I ever meet. And she got to the point where, like, I would say, what else do you need to tell us about our relationship? And she would say, I think everything's going really good. Do you want to make out? You know, that's cool. Yeah, it was great. And, um, so today when I'm in my emotions, which happens often, you know, but my emotions are actually contained and that I'm not projecting them on her because we can, as men, we should express our emotions. There's not a Brotherhood call that goes by, there's not a meeting of our society where men aren't crying.

Yeah.

And sometimes most of the group is crying, but it's contained emotions in that it's not projected on somebody else. It's understanding that we're processing, we're letting things out of our body, we're not weaponizing or using it to enforce around us. And so when you say, how does Katie hold that part of me? I would say very easily. And she welcomes it and she talks me through it and I feel more seen and heard and validated than I ever have in my life. You know, there's this thing I share with men who are coming towards the brotherhood that as men, I think a lot of us have heard the term fuck you money. You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah.

Like, you have so much money, fuck you, it doesn't matter.

You say no to anything.

Okay, so I've had fuck you money for a long time, and it's awesome. Like, it's great having that backstop, but I would not even be concerned if it all went away tomorrow because I have a fuck you relationship. I am seen and heard and held in a way that men don't ever get to be seen, heard, and held unless they go through this process. And I walk out in the world with a level of confidence— not arrogance, but a level of confidence, not ego— a level of presence, and a level of understanding that I know that if I intend for something to happen, that thing will happen. And when I say I could lose everything, I know I won't because I am in a totally different level of presence and awareness. And so having a relationship where there's, you know, this concept of secure attachment, which I really can't stand attachment theory. I think it's so broken and so challenging how it's been laid out. It just, it justifies too many challenging behaviors and gets people to own an attachment which they shouldn't, because attachment theory should really be called Detachment theory. The only attachment is secure. All the rest of them are detached and reactive.

Sure.

And so I have this level of secure attachment where the people around me actually feel it.

Yes, but I want to push back because your level of attachment, your level of masculinity, your level of containment with Katie is, yes, the fulcrum of that which you've created. And a union is two. Mm-hmm. So there is an elegant dance. That her level of maturity, her way of being dances with you in the space that you've created for containment. Yeah. So we can't just say— we cannot say that it's— most men right now are feeling like I'm carrying the weight of the world. A lot of men, their shoulders are sore. They're going to work. They're doing all the things. This to me has felt like, and I'm sure a lot of men feel this, and I love that we can talk this way. Another thing on my shoulders. Yeah, another responsibility, Alex, when I'm already paying the bills, doing this, I'm going to therapy, I'm doing EMDR, I'm doing breathwork. In my case, I've created an entire life to be humbled and to be authentic about my own journey of development publicly, which is pretty gnarly sometimes. Sure. Because I'm like, should I share this? So, so then what is the dance, my friend? What is the dance of you doing your deepest, most loving work that you've, that you've done such an incredible job of sharing. Like, there's so many more layers of the onion for you. What is the dance? What is her, what is her role in the dance? To be led. I remember we were in Hawaii on a vacation once, and it was such a challenge. Like, I was doing my best to lead her, and she, like, wouldn't let me lead her.

Yeah, because she didn't feel safe.

She wouldn't, she didn't feel safe.

Yeah.

So then, to the degree that I'm providing safety and containment, also has a reciprocal. Because every two numbers that are added have a sum. So the sum total of the containment I'm bringing forth and that any man is bringing forth is also added or multiplied by what she is bringing forth. Not as a responsibility, not as a checkmark for her to do so that I can provide containment. What I'm asking you is, what is the dance? What is the dance of you providing containment and her receiving it?

Okay, so first, um, I want to answer that question cautiously, okay? Because what every man— not every man— what so many men hear when they hear of this work is a knee-jerk reaction to, what does she have to do? This isn't fair.

And, and that's not where my question is coming from.

I hear you, but I want to make sure we— for everybody else who's feeling that. Yeah, because here's where, where that question often comes from. It's a feeling of justice and fairness, and I need to be seen, and I need to be heard, and this isn't fair. And you didn't say that, Josh. But I know that that question will bring that up for people who are listening. So I don't want to project that on you. I want to project against the audience going in that direction. Yes. Because when you say enough containment or you're providing containment, the way that you know you've done it is you see the results.

Mm-hmm.

You see her nervous system soften. You see her take deep breaths. You see her lean into you. I'll give you a very clear example. Early on in these, um, ceremonies every day, it was a lot of me listening and a lot of her expressing. And then we would finish and I would be like, okay, I'm gonna do this again tomorrow. But I remember this ceremony early on where it was rough. Like, brother, it was rough. Like, I heard things about myself I never wanted to hear. My wife told me that there was times where I was sexually manipulative and we had sex and she didn't want to. And there was times where I made her feel completely objectified. And there was times where, like, sex had become such a process that it felt like we were just checking a box and, like, we'd do it and, and, like, she didn't feel into it, I didn't feel into it. She told me she would disassociate during sex because I was so not present that she would become not present, and she reacted to not being there by also leaving the space. It was so hard to hear. And I remember that arc of like, oh, it's getting worse and now it's getting better. And man, as it started getting better, I remember that night there was something that happened in my body where I'm like, oh man, I'm winning. Like, I'm winning. And what I heard is like having an effect on me, but I'm showing myself that this is safe. And I'm like repatterning my nervous system right in this moment. I could feel it. Like, I will never do this again. And I could feel that, like, this is not going to ever happen again because I'm right here understanding, not hearing, not holding space, not like just being present, but hearing and understanding and embodying what she said. And I knew it would never happen again. And as we went through that arc of her coming back down to baseline, and I asked, is there anything else? And there was a few times. And I got to the point where, is there anything else? No. And I said, is there anything else we need to fix? No. I mean, gosh, that shocked me like the first dozen times. And I'm like, okay, this is just how it is. And I said, okay, so ceremony's closed. And at the end of the ceremony, we each say something like, my name is Alex, and I'm really glad we did this, and I appreciate you for sharing with me, and I love you more than anything, and I want you to know that you are loved and adored and cherished and worshiped for the divine precious goddess that you are. And I'm complete. And then she says something similar, and we close the ceremony. And I remember that night turning to get my stuff and thinking like, man, this was awesome. Like, this was so different. And as I'm thinking, this was awesome and so different, I'm thinking, I'm gonna go write in my journal right now and go like get this down. Out of nowhere, she— out of nowhere, she jumped on me, and it was like the most intense, passionate connected intimacy we had ever had, even in our honeymoon period. Like, nothing had ever matched this night. And what I recognized in that moment was that this was like doing something totally different for us. And I had no idea what it was, Josh. I laid in bed that night, Katie fell asleep, and I was staring at the ceiling thinking, like, what just happened and how do I make it happen again? You know, like That is how I want my life to be. Yeah. And so here's what came through over time, Josh. Like masculine and feminine energy, right? There's so many people who teach polarity, and, um, most of what's taught in polarity really bothers me because it's, it's like gimmicks. It's, you know, we're gonna do BDSM, or you're gonna hold her in a way, or move her in a way, or show up in a way, and you're gonna play act this thing called polarity, which is— can be fun, but if safety is not present, polarity is going to have a hard time showing up. And what I realized over time was that as a man, when we create this place of containment, we are dominating ourselves. And I want to make that very clear: we are not dominating her, we're dominating ourselves. We are in a dominant posture of, I am going to contain, I'm going to transmute and metabolize the energy that's coming up, I'm going I breathe and show myself that I'm safe. And we are in a place of dominance of ourselves. And if we're dominant of ourselves and we're creating safety, we give her the opportunity to surrender in a natural way, not a gimmick, in a real way. And so when we are in that place of dominance and she steps in and actually feels like she can surrender and emote and be real and be seen and heard in any level of expression that she brings up, short of being abusive, but like short of, of character assassination and that type of stuff. But like I tell men, any level of volume is not abusive, any level of animation is not abusive, any level of emotional expression is not abusive. It's actually a gift. You're seeing her inner world, you're understanding her vulnerability. And if you're able to do that, you naturally create a dominant presence of yourself, not her. You lead through the conversation by asking questions and by being curious. And so you step into leadership and she feels that dominance. She feels being led in a safe way and she surrenders into you. And that creates more polarity than any gimmick in the world.

That's the dance. So you just— if there's more, there's more, go for it. But that, that was the question. That was the answer I was looking for.

Yeah.

The dance of the polarity that I agree with you is pretty bastardized, especially here in Austin.

Oh my gosh, it's so parties and BDSM and polyamory and all this.

Honestly, again, what I talked about— the distortion.

So distorted.

The distraction energy.

It's so challenging.

It feels like it's the work, but that's actually just our ego and hedonism taking pole.

That's what I'm saying about like spiritual language sending you in the wrong direction. Absolutely. You know, there's this extraordinarily beautiful— I get a little emotional about this. Tantra has changed my life. Like, understanding the concepts between Tantra, this extraordinary Taoism, both are so amazing. Like Taoism's kind of do the thing, and Tantra is feel it. Tantra is this embodied practice of divine union. It's where you actually use your nervous systems and touch and presence and non-expectation to become entirely like different people by revealing what really is there at the essence of the two of you. And when sometimes when I tell people I practice Tantra, they're like, oh, polyamory, because that's what it's been bastardized into by this quote-unquote spiritual community that has taken beautiful belief system and turned it into cuddle puddles. And, you know, like going and swinging and swapping and doing all kinds of other crap that only takes your nervous system immediately and almost irrevocably in the wrong direction. Polyamory is polyagony. And I'm sorry to draw such a hard line, but I don't— I mean, if people are coming towards the Brotherhood and they ask me like, hey, can I do this with, you know, a girlfriend and a wife, My answer is absolutely not. Don't even come in the container. Yeah, that's not going to make sense, and it's— and you're going to infect every man around you with your chaotic, absolutely out-of-your-body energy because you are trying to do something that's not natural.

It's, it's biologically explained through the limbic system, 100%. The entire, the entire arc of addiction that I learned about through Gary Wilson's book Your Brain on Porn, he talked about the limbic system and I had Nir Eyal on the podcast and he was the guy that would like addict people to phones and he left social media and he's like, here's how to not get hooked. That's his hook model. And he said that it's not just the reward, it's the variable reward that drives addiction. When we, when we go to social media, it's that we don't know what's going to be there. When we go to open up the porn, it's the whole process. When we go to have sex with our wife's friend because we've justified hedonism as polyamory and spiritual expansion. There's this time between when we do the act and then the lead-up and kind of like the edging of the act, if you will, the excitement that fuels anything that our ego wants to fuel itself with. The validation of, uh, it's okay to fuck everyone else because it's about expansion and play. It's okay to lust after women. It's okay to use screens. It's okay to—

you can—

we can literally— what I'm saying is we could justify almost anything. And you can use spiritual language to do it, and you can use any type of language to do it. So that's not what I'm talking about. I'm glad we talked about that. I want to go one layer deeper with you because you, you describe the dance and polyamory and the addiction cycle and the limbic system has nothing to do with my question. My question is the dance that Katie brings to you and, and the dance that you lead her through It seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, it's what I'm getting from you is that not her responsibility, not her role, not the hardcore expectation that she must do it, but just the natural order of chaos seeking peace would be for her to surrender into you as a man. And then, like you said on our hike yesterday, when a man truly holds containment, her work to be done will be, will be revealed.

100%. Can you go into that? That happened in our relationship.

Can you go into that with core examples? Because I think this will extinguish some of the vigilance that men are experiencing when they hear you say provide containment and they say, I'm already fucking burdened.

Yeah, no, 100%. You know, I go into this explanation with caution because of what I said earlier. The knee-jerk response is, if I'm going to do this, what is she going to do? Because as men, we have become, and a lot of us live totally transactionally.

Sure.

I have made the decision that my life will not be transactional. My relationship with you is not transactional. And you feel that, you know, it's totally different than a lot of relationships that we have in business. Yeah. You know, there was a time where you reached out and said, like, hey, will you jump on a call with me? And I hadn't seen you in forever. And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. Like, when do you need it? Because— and I wasn't thinking, like, what is Josh Trent gonna do for me? I was thinking, here's a man who is reaching out for help and in vulnerability. And asking for help is not giving up. It's refusing to give up. And it's the hardest thing we do. And so I jumped on a call with you.

I think what happened is I saw your post.

Yeah.

And I commented and I was like, well, how does Katie feel? I wanted to bring Katie into the conversation. Yeah. And then you private message me and you're just like, hey, man, it's been a while. You know, like, let's chat. And I was like, wow, I literally had a nervous breakdown two nights ago. And then you reached out to me. It was literally a God moment.

Yeah, I felt it. I felt it when I saw your comment.

I told you this before, and I, I can feel emotion when I tell you this. Many people have come into my life to, to be a fuel source for me to heal generational patterns. You are 100% someone that's come into my life through God so that I can let go of these emotional patterns.

Yeah, no doubt, Josh.

And these emotional patterns are so deep in my family. So deep, bro.

I hear you, man. I hear you.

They're— the level of, um, the level of resistance, the level of sexual immaturity, the level of complete unconsciousness on both sides, my maternal and paternal, are so— there's so much, um, cleanup that's needed. There's been times in my EMDR where I'm like, I can't, I can't bear this right now.

I know, like, I can't, I can't.

I can't feel their weight and my weight. And there was this moment with Christy where she took me through a process with EMDR, and I went to this round circle in a field and I said, like, these, these covert contracts are now complete. Like, these contracts are complete. I have evidence of God in my life through you, through many people, through the work that I'm doing in the world, which is God, experiencing God. The challenge that I still feel is there are times when the weight of what I'm sharing with you is so much that it makes me just want to go run and hide. It's almost like I can feel fucking the whole collective pain of my entire lineage going back 7 generations, and like, it's fucking overwhelming, dude.

Yeah. Oh, it's so—

it's like really overwhelming. So that's where a lot of my questions come from to you of like, I'm do— I'm trying so hard, bro. Can she just support me a little bit? Can she make it easier on me? And I want to speak to the heart of all men that feel like I'm feeling too, whether we are— remember what I said earlier? It's like whatever is being felt, even if it's not being said, is still fucking being felt.

100%.

This, this 7th generation principle, I feel it every day. I feel it in every podcast. I feel it in every EMDR session. It's always there. And there are times where I'm just like, is it ever going to go away? Like, is it ever going to stop this pain, this grief, this anguish that I feel? Is it— I feel like not victimized by it, but I feel like I felt owned by it. Yeah. So anyways, what, what came up for you when I shared?

You know what, what came up to me, for me, was you were talking, was that when I was coming off sabbatical, you were one of the first people that I connected with. And this is why, like, giving up transactions makes so much sense, because what I knew on our call was that it was just as much a gift for me as it was for you. And that your vulnerability and transparency and what you were willing to share with me and letting me into your inside world so reinforced so much what I had learned and so much what I understand. And so like being on that call, you're like, it was divine. And I went on the other side, and at the end of the call I remember telling you like, hey, you said, what can I do for you? And I said, man, you don't need to do anything. Like the way you showed up and the way you shared with me tonight was so powerful for me and so validating for me that I need nothing. Like, we are even, you know? Don't even think about a transaction. Like, this— I feel like I got more out of that call than you did, and you felt more— you got more out of the call than I did. And so we're even, sure, you know?

Yeah.

And so I think for men, when we're approaching this work and we think, what is her work going to be, the first thing is like, release that. Release that in the moment. Don't bring that to the conversation, because if you're sitting down and willing to take anything less than 100% responsibility, she's gonna feel it. And when I heard her truth, when I heard her truth, I took 100% responsibility that, like, I was here and that's your truth. And I didn't deny any of her truth. And here's what happened over time, Josh. We got into a place where, like, we were having ceremonies and there was no longer all this stuff to process because it was kind of done. And I had shared so much with Katie, like, I wanted to share everything with her because I started understanding that the more she understood and the more she knew about me and the more she understood my past, that, like, I didn't have anything to hide. And I wanted to be in that place of not hiding and complete and utter transparency and, and vulnerability with her. And there was a night where she's like, hey, if you want to keep sharing, you can, but I feel really good, you know? And it was kind of funny. I'm like, oh man, I've I think I've gotten to the point where, like, we're in that place.

Yeah.

And then here's what would happen every once in a while. And oddly enough— like, not oddly enough, predictably— it would come up mostly around our kids. Katie grew up in an extraordinarily unsafe environment where she was constantly attacked. She had— and I mean attacked, like, in so many different ways. There was abuse. Um, there was very, uh, uncontained men around her on both sides. She had a stepfather and a stepfather— or, sorry, a father and a stepfather. That both had their own special way of making her feel really unsafe. And so what would happen in our relationship is that I would be having a corrective conversation with one of our daughters, especially our younger daughter, and sometimes from another room, but out of nowhere, Katie would jump in and take it over. And so that drama triangle would immediately be present. Like, here I am having a conversation with my daughter And Katie comes in as, like, you know, the rescuer. And so I'm obviously perpetrator, and now we have a victim, and now the whole thing spins out of control. And so there was a point, I don't remember exactly when, where there was a day where I was like, I'm going to set a boundary around this. And boundaries cannot be set in rupture. That's what men try to do all the time. It's like you're yelling and screaming, it's like, you can't ever do this again. That's just a correction. That's an inflammatory. That feels like control. It feels like you can't do it. And so I waited until the next night ceremony because what had happened during that day was I was having a conversation with Alexandra and I was telling her like, hey kid, you can't do this. Like, I need you to really like show up in a different way. Like, you're doing this thing over— I don't remember what it was, but it was not uncontained. I wasn't yelling at her. She was actually talking with me. And so we're having a conversation about it and I'm at the point where I'm like, okay, what you think you should do? Because like, I always turn it over to my kids, you know, we don't do restriction and all that other stuff. It's like, you tell me like how you're going to show up different. I think it might have been around her health. And Katie came in and triangulated, and the entire conversation dissolved into like rescuer, victim, perpetrator. And I'm like, okay, this just can't happen anymore. So the next night in ceremony, we sat down and we opened ceremony. And like, there's a formal open we do, and we both set an intention for that night, like my intention is. And I— and my intention was pretty direct. It's like, my intention is to communicate with you about how many times and how often you are triangulating with Alexandra, and you're making it so that I can't have a relationship with her like I need to. You are showing her that masculine energy is unsafe, which it isn't, and you are constantly putting us in the drama triangle. I'm ready to open ceremony. And then I very clearly, but in a contained, non-projective, non-aggressive way said, here's what's happening over and over, and I think you can see this, and here's how it feels for me. Like, I feel invalidated, I feel emasculated. I also feel like I'm losing connection with our daughter, which is really challenging. Like, she— I think at the time she was 14 or 15, and I'm like, she's, she's 14 or 15, we only have a certain amount of time with her left, and like, I'm determined to help her understand the world and to see where she missteps and have her help and help her create solutions. And so here's the behavior I'd request. Is it like when I'm talking to her, you no longer jump in the middle and you hold it? And if you have to like squeeze your hands and, you know, tighten your muscles or whatever you need to do, like, this is a place where you can't jump in anymore because this pattern is literally accepting the relationship. You're not allowing me to have a relationship with my daughter. And I was direct but calm and present, and I was determined but I was not aggressive. And that boundary was set, and since then it hasn't really happened again. And it's funny, uh, like a long time afterwards when I was like working on content and understanding things different, I asked Katie about that conversation. I'm like, hey, do you remember this time that this— and she's like, oh my God, it was such a turn-on. I'm like, what? She was like, oh yeah, I remember that conversation. I was so excited by the end. And I'm like, really? Huh, I'm gonna go figure that out.

Like, how did that—

and so here's, here's why. I drew a protective boundary around our relationship. I drew a protective boundary around our daughter. I used masculine energy to create massive amounts of safety, and I was dominant of myself, not my wife. But I explained it in a way where she could surrender into a solution, and it created insane polarity.

All right, amazing. The place we get to go next is about feminine testing. Oh, because you brought it forth right now. One thing that's been challenging for me— I'll give a metaphor to you guys. Many times in my life, and even it still comes around again, but it's actually less frequent, is this resentment that I've had for the fact that life isn't fair for men. Now, we're not victims as men, but life inherently is structured differently. And if you want to go biblical, you can if you want to go metaphysical or spiritual, if you want to go back to the Essenes, you could describe it however you want to describe it, is what I'm saying. Like, as men, our containment and the way in which we show up to relationship essentially sets the tone. And that was hard for me to grok for a super long time. It was almost like I was so angry, I was trying to chop down a tree, but the end of my axe had like no blade on it, and I'm just like sitting there hitting the tree of resentment.

The tree keeps growing on the other side.

The tree keeps growing. The tree never falls down. I'm just like, is my resentment ever going to go away?

Yeah.

So the, the antidote to my resentment was actually humility. It was acceptance. On the screen right now is the Hawkins scale, which I love. And whether you resonate with him or not, I don't know.

Oh, completely.

Okay, great. So, so at 175 is pride, at 200 is courage, and then acceptance is above. So the reason why I'm circling on the screen right now the, the model that I've learned through Power vs. Force, through God, I mean, so much of his work is because— damn, the reason I have it on the wall, Alex, is a constant reminder to check myself of where I am in my emotions such that I can provide containment. And the thing that pulled me away from containment for a long time, and sometimes still does, that I'm just aware of, has been my resentment to accepting what is there, to the truth of what is there. And the truth of what is there has been this core language that I learned from Mark Wollin. It's not fair. Imagine me as like a 4-year-old. My dad's not there. It's not fair. It's not fair. That phrase, it's not fair, is like a core language pattern that I identified that was the fuel for my resentment and my inability to be in acceptance of what is. And I think many men struggle with that. It's like, Maybe even some of the questions you felt for me have an essence of that, of like, what's, what's her role in the dance? It's like, yeah, well, it's different though. There's, there's a mature way to recognize that life's not fair. And then there's a victimization of us as men. Yeah, life's not fair. Let's red pill each other. Yeah, it's all her, bro. She's only, she's only going to be loyal to her feelings. Like this, this divisive, like warlike language.

Yeah.

That we feel out there on, especially on social media. So the question is, if life isn't fair for men, then how can we rise in maturity to the unfortunate and honestly unfair situations where we are tested by our woman? Yeah, how do we rise in maturity to that? And how do we know what's, what's healthy testing and what's unhealthy testing?

So first, I just want to point out, like, the red pill is poison. And so anybody who moves in that direction, it is the most vile and disgusting relationship information there is.

So is the other side, the fifth wave feminism, men suck, Kill men.

Agree. It's all devices. We go to either side of the spectrum and we get out to the edge. Yeah, like it's, it's the most vile but also the most validating for some people. Because if you validate people's wounds and you say, hey, it's all their fault and you don't have to do work and it's just how women are and they're manipulative and coercive and that's how they, they were made by God, then it's like, okay, it's them, not me, right? And so a lot of people swallow the red pill, but it's poison. It will kill you.

Do you know how many courses are sold to women by these men that just validate all the wounds in women? Same thing on the man side.

100%.

All they're doing is just speaking to the person's pain. Like, buy my course and I'll just validate more of your pain instead of getting people the peace and wholeness.

I mean, that's a lot of personal—

pretty gross—

you just described.

It's pretty gross.

Yeah, unfortunately a lot of personal development and a lot of men's work— men's work— is validating wounding. You know, all of these like, let's go be a warrior, and, uh, you know, I'm gonna go get my ass kicked on the beach and pretend like I'm a Navy SEAL.

Garrett White stuff.

Yeah, it's just such garbage. You used his name, I didn't.

Okay.

But he specifically triggers me in a crazy way because what he is actually doing is out loud in public, just like Andrew Tate, is sharing childhood wounding. It's like, look, I'm wounded and I'm wounded and I'm wounded and I'm so fucking wounded. And what is happening is men go, me too. And so then they follow these guys that say the most vile shit and they treat men like garbage and they, you know, Brother, you've been pretty clear about what you've been through in your life. You don't need to get your ass kicked on the beach. You know what you need? You need to be held in love.

Absolutely.

And in truth and in validation and in masculine energy that is present and clean and contained. Because the same way I feel like every night I sat down with Katie, we weren't just talking, she was healing. She was healing. Like, think about that. That is healing. And it was my energy that was present to heal her. And it was her vulnerability that was present to heal me and show me that I was safe and show me that I could be there. So, so much of what is out there is just complete and total utter garbage.

So it's like the pole position would be anytime we feel super validated in our victimhood, look out.

Anything that makes you feel righteous is probably wrong.

And this is really crazy too, because the AI trend— the phone watches your eyes. The phone sees what you watch. We all get to be very cautious of what you're talking about. Yeah, not from fear, but like just awareness.

Awareness.

The algorithm is so insanely trained, and now even more with the Advanced Plus and the AI with Meta. If you're not careful, and I've fallen into this trap, you can get start— you can, you can actually be mentally manipulated by your feed.

100%.

You can be mentally manipulated, and the next thing you know, a wife or a husband might spark an argument because they spent 30 minutes scrolling on Instagram. Get the fuck off Instagram. Yeah. And if you are going to be on Instagram, be hypervigilant with the way in which you clean your feed.

Yeah, for sure.

Stay off or just stay off. Yeah. I mean, our goal as a company is to get them off Instagram and into our community.

Yeah, same way. That's it.

We're putting you out of that.

Yeah, we're putting together like a waiting room for the next container and we're making the decision this week. Is it Facebook groups or another platform? And I had a discussion with my team this morning. I'm like, look, I can't leave people on.

It's definitely another platform.

Got to be another platform. Yeah. And they'll come to us because they need I need this.

Can we get back to the healthy testing versus the unhealthy testing?

So let's talk about what feminine testing is. Yeah, so here's what happens when a woman starts to feel safe. Like, things can actually get more challenging at the beginning than get better. And I think this is where a lot of men who think that they're providing containment, or who believe they're providing containment, and they feel like, hey, I'm doing this and it's getting worse, so it's not working, is where they get hung up. It's like, I'm doing the thing, and it's again transactional. Like, we have to release transaction because here's what often happens. When we begin to provide safety, it may be— not maybe, in almost all cases, it's the first time in a woman's life she's ever felt emotionally and spiritually safe. The first time. Like, emotional safety and security is not something that's present for women, and most of them don't understand it. And so our bodies get used to what is familiar, even if it's uncomfortable. Like, this is why alcoholics drink every night. This is why there's relationships that have this trauma bond where they fight every single day and they never stop being together. And it's because it's familiar. It can be unhealthy, it can be unsafe, but it's familiar. And so when we have that familiar feeling, like our nervous system has behaved one way and it's used to one thing, and all of a sudden you take a woman who's been in a level of unsafety her whole life and you create safety, there's a part of her that says, is this real?

Yeah.

You know, there's a part of her that says, is this breakable? And there's a part of her, usually a very young part of her— and I want to make it clear, I'm not saying that women are children, but I'm saying we all have an inner child. Sure. And that disassociated young part of us can come forth and be horrible. And as a man, you can be in a place of containment and receiving an output that makes no sense in the world. And the way that I explain it to the men in the brotherhood is she is testing you. She's testing you. Not, not her adult self. There is a young part of her. I actually encourage the men in the brotherhood to get a childhood picture of their wives and put it on their desk so that you remember there is a young part of her that you are yelling at. There's a young part of her that you're invalidating because— and I tell them all, like, how many of you have kids? And a lot of them do. And I say, has your kid ever said, Daddy, I hate you? Like, let's be honest, almost every kid says that at some point. You take something away. Oh yeah, my kids have said that.

I'm like, really?

I hate you. And do you, do you turn to them and be like, oh yeah, I hate you too? Never.

I just say, that's not nice to say.

Well, or I used to say, Reagan, I'm so sorry you feel that way. Like, tell me what's going on, baby. Yeah. Like, why do you hate Daddy right now?

Yes, I always say, what are you feeling?

Yeah.

Like, what are you feeling?

You know, you're being mean. Well, Monkey, I know you wanted to have that screen for longer, but like, we have to stop. It's your bedtime. I know, but you're being mean and I really am mad. I hate you. Yeah, yeah. And so the way I explain it is there's this young disassociated part of her that's saying like, hey, this isn't safe. This is unfamiliar.

Even when he's bringing forth safety.

100%. Yeah. This is unfamiliar. This is foreign. This doesn't feel normal. This doesn't feel okay. And so a young part of her, like with Katie and I, this happened early on. Like, remember, the medicine told me I had to hold my center, so I did everything that I could to do that. And I would walk into a room and she'd just be irritated with me, and I'd think like, oh, what? How did we get into a fight? I didn't know we were getting into a fight. Like, how did a fight become present? And I'd ask questions and she would escalate and just say like, I'm fine and I don't want to talk right now and I just need my space. And I'd be like, whoa, Oh, okay, like, what's happening? Well, what I came to understand is that that young part of her is actually testing to see if this new safety is real or if it's a temporary condition. Because so many women have experienced temporary conditions, Josh. So many. Like, almost every woman I've ever talked to— not all, but a lot of women I've talked to— have played back the, I get together with somebody and they feel safe, and then it's not real. Over time becomes less safe. Or I've had men tell me like this one thing, and then they don't behave that way. So it's unsafe. And so they've had this reinforcement of lack of safety and reinforcement of behaviors, like a father who would yell and scream at one point and then like cuddle and want to be close and be safe in another point. And so like they've been in this place of like not understanding safety, not feeling safety, not embodying safety. Not being able to even feel safe. And so when we start creating safety, we are winning when reactions come out of her body because she's purging, she's moving it out of her body. And so I tell the men in the Brotherhood, like, if you walk in and she's irritated and frustrated, like, you're winning, you're winning. You're in a place where she's showing you her inside world in that moment. And there's all types of interventions we talk about. There's an easy one of like, hey, why don't you tell me what's going on? I'd love to understand, you know, I feel like something's present and I don't know what it is and I really want to understand. Or like one of the easiest interventions, and we have guys do this all the time, is you walk in and she's in that state of irritation. Like Josh, when I used to walk in and Katie was in that state of irritation, I would want to run. Oh my God, like get me out of here, right?

Yeah.

You do the opposite. You walk over and just wrap her up in your arms and hold her, even if she braces. Even if she braces. Because you know what happens if you do it for like 8 seconds, 10 seconds, 12 seconds? Her body's going to start feeling different chemicals and she will soften.

Yeah.

And I've had men in the Brotherhood say like, I did it, you know. Like, we have this Telegram channel that is hyperactive. It's not active, it's hyperactive. There's men all the way around the world. So when I'm going to sleep, even if I've cleared all the messages, when I wake up, Australia and, and Switzerland and like New Zealand have all kicked in. And so like, we constantly have messages in there, but there's messages from men that say Walked into the room, my wife was in a reaction. I could feel it. I didn't know what it was. I walked over and hugged her and, and she braced and she kind of wiggled and she tried to hug me sideways and I pulled her closer and I took a deep breath and I felt her body release. And there's one specific message where the guy's like, she just started sobbing and I held her like kind of in confusion, but like, okay, Alex said I'm winning, so I'm just gonna hold her. And she started sobbing and talking about like some stuff that had happened to her and why she was feeling frustrated. And it all came out in that moment. And like, that story repeats over and over again because as men, when we walk in the room and we feel her nervous system, here's what we have to understand. It's so awesome. It's like the best thing ever is that if her nervous system is dysregulated and we regulate ours, we can calm hers. There's so many times where— and this happens like this always happens now. It didn't always happen before, but like this morning I laid down in bed with Katie. I was downstairs working. She gets up after I get up, and this morning there was just something about the morning where I'm like, okay, I just need to go see her for like 10 minutes even though she's not awake. I'm gonna end up waking her up a few minutes early, but like right now in this moment I need to go see her. And I went up and I laid down next to her and I pulled her close and I took a deep breath, and immediately her body took the breath with me. And I just kept breathing, and she was right there with me. Like, there's a state of co-regulation that we step into almost immediately now. And so, you know, as men, we need to understand that if there's chaos, we can be the man who walks into the storm, takes a deep breath, and calms it. You know, the most contained man in history— do you know who he is? Jesus.

I was just gonna— I was actually—

it's Jesus, right?

I was gonna be like Buddha? Jesus?

No, it's Jesus. It's Jesus. I get emotional when I talk about this, but like, look at his entire life. He created safety and he acted in a way that no man had ever acted. And he didn't just create safety for himself. He told the people around him to create safety for each other. He said, love each other, see each other, hear each other, validate each other. He was literally talking about containment. And even when he went and turned the tables in the temple because there was evil things happening, what did he do first? He sat down in stillness and braided a whip. He didn't run in there all emotional. He went in and made a point in the center of containment. He went into a storm and calmed it. And what happened around Jesus? Men felt safe. Women felt safe. Children felt safe. The disadvantaged, disenfranchised people who'd been judged by everyone felt safe. He didn't just go to see the lepers. He touched them and showed them they were okay. And on the way to his mortal death, like in the last of his days, when he knew he was going to leave this earth, he never broke containment. On a cross, did not break containment. You know, so many of us say, I'm like Jesus and I live like Jesus and I walk like Jesus. No, you don't. You've turned his words into a war. You've turned him into judgment. You've turned him into a way to look down on other people. If you live like Jesus, you would contain yourself. And you would understand and you would love those around you and you would create safety because that's all he ever did. And the way that his words and life have been twisted into a platform to make people feel good about doing the wrong thing in the world disgusts me. Yeah, I have a close personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but I will not call myself a Christian because Christianity today is the biggest distortion of what he stood for. And it's so challenging because there's actually preachers and, and men and sometimes women that have somehow taken the life of Jesus and turned it into a weapon. And it was anything but.

The, the most powerful— thank you so much for that, man.

Yeah, my pleasure.

The most powerful things that I've learned never have come through the mouth of dogma.

Never. Dogma is poison.

Dogma inherently I don't know the etymology, but my understanding of dogma is like the only way to do something is the way that I'm bringing forth. And if you don't do this, then you're in shame and you need to burn in hell forever. Yeah, that's not the kind of God that I know wants to experience Godself in unlimited ways on Earth.

That's not—

that's not the kind of God that's there.

I've got a suggestion for everybody listening. I know men and women listen to this. I speak to men from an embodied experience. Here's my suggestion. Take a break from church for a Sunday. I know that's heresy, I get it. Take a break. And instead of spending that hour with somebody else interpreting the word of God for you, somebody else telling you how you should behave, which by the way is an interpretation from a man to another man to another man to another man to another man to another man, and a complete— like, you line up 10 kids in school and have one whisper in one of their ears and go to The telephone game.

That's what it is.

Like, that's what we have. The dogma is the telephone game. Yeah, but we all have this gift that so few of us realize and so few of us step into, that we can just go into a room and lay down on the ground or lay down on a bed, throw an eye mask on, put one hand on your heart and one hand on your stomach, feel your body and breathe until you connect with Jesus, until you connect with source, until you connect with your higher power. And create that personal connection. Because here's what's real. When somebody is saying Jesus has given us the right to hurt this other person, Jesus has given us the right to challenge this other person, to judge this other person. That is an entirely uncontained way of looking at Jesus. And he was the most contained man who ever lived. And if we get into stillness and silence and we hold ourselves, And we ask, is it okay for me to judge this other person because of who they are and who they believe they are? Your body will tell you no. And that is the word of God. There is wisdom in your body because this is what we use to connect with our higher power. And so many of us want to use logic and dogma and, and so much like interpretation. Cut out the interpretation. Go get still and feel it. It will change your entire life. It did mine.

Man, there's a moment last year where Alison Armstrong sat right there. And, and I can see how both of your truths are like this beautiful sandwich that I want to bring forth. Because she said to me, I remember the clip got like 3 million views on Instagram.

Oh, jeez.

I'll cry. And it went viral. She said, I want to speak to all the men out there. Only honorable men feel shame. It is your ability to feel the shame that makes you honorable. And I think there's so much wisdom in that, because when you bring forth this understanding of containment, it's not that Jesus never felt emotions. No, he was human, right?

He felt a ton.

He felt a ton. It's not as us as men who are doing our very wholehearted best to provide containment for ourselves and to be a space of real containment. It's not like we don't feel the emotions. We feel them on such a deep level. But truly, there's a reason why on the Hawkins scale, shame is at the bottom. I think it's 20, the frequency of Hertz. Hertz, how many times something vibrates in a second. So like my inability to feel my shame when I go into the kitchen and my wife is bracing is the degree of the quality of my relationship. So I can, I can see how what you're bringing forth, what Allison is bringing forth, is such a powerful— like, if y'all get one thing from this podcast, it's understanding through Alex what containment really is and bringing in— it's almost like you guys are on a— well, you are, you're on a similar stage here. My ability to feel all the ranges of my emotions, including shame, is such a powerful gift to my wife. It's such a gift to myself and my children. And damn, what I want to say is it's so hard for me at times to really feel my shame. It's really hard for me to feel it. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I fabricate a story as to why I shouldn't feel it. And then, then I start feeling shame about my inability to feel shame. You know, the shame spiral that— Yeah, that I know, you know, I was just going to say, after taking a deep breath, like, it's the Like you said, with your first night with Katie, you're like, I didn't die, right? It's like, I didn't die. Okay, I can feel my shame and not die. It's actually just my fucking ego. Yeah, my ego will die. And I say good. I say good. What were you gonna share?

It's also this protective part of you, Josh, that, that like, it's not just ego. Like, you have an inner child too.

Sure.

You have an inner child that's terrified of being wrong. You have an inner child that's terrified of punishment. You specifically, with a bipolar mom, have an inner child that is terrified of chaos.

Oh, for sure.

Right. And contradiction and incongruency. Like, your inner child's like, hold on, safety. It's got to be the same. It's got to be right. It's got—

you know, unless she's happy, we're not okay.

Yeah, 100%.

Oh, yeah.

And so what happens so often to us when we get into a shame spiral when we feel an emotion we don't want to feel. Like, first we need to understand, like, imposters don't have— like, imposters don't have imposter syndrome. They're imposters. And so if we're feeling like we're not doing it right, we're doing it right. And when you feel that shame spiral or you feel yourself suppressing that emotion, you feel yourself pushing something down, take the opposite tact. And like, I can't remember how many years ago it was, but Kylee Ryan, who you mentioned, one of my closest friends in the world and one of the most brilliant people on the planet, like legit. She rewrote the drama triangle in a way that's so much more— like, that's good, hers is better, hers is even better. And she told me one time in a coaching session, she said, Alex, you know what's coming through for me is that you're the guy who created all the frameworks around momentum, and that momentum is like this life force, this important thing. And all these people have validated you, and you've been on all these stages, and you've spoken with your childhood heroes, and it's all about momentum. And she said, I think this next stage of your life is understanding how to create momentum from stillness. And Josh, when she said it, my entire body rejected it. I'm like, stillness? What the fuck are you talking about? Stillness? Yeah, like, what does that even mean, right? And here's what it means. So if I find myself— and it's not too often anymore But if I find myself in a loop or a spiral, in a place where I've got the same thing coming up over and over again, what I know is that it's an emotion I'm not willing to feel. And so it's just hanging out there and creating chaos and creating like discordance in my body. You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're feeling it.

Oh yeah.

So here's what I do now. I go into my office and I lay down and I put a bolster under my knee. I like to be on the ground for this. Some people like to be in a bed. I put a bolster under my knee. And I have a Manta Ray eye mask that blocks out all the light. Yeah. And doesn't mess with my eyes and doesn't touch my eyelashes because it drives me crazy. And I put a hand on my heart and a hand on my chest. No music, no nothing. And I start breathing and I bring it forth and I let it come up. Like, where— let's bring up the spiral. Like, I know it's been happening all day. I'm gonna breathe, I'm gonna bring it up, I'm going to feel it where it is in my body. And, you know, like A lot of times for me, when stuff comes up, it feels like heat in my face, heat in my body, stimulation in my feet, stimulation in my shoulders. And wherever that is, I breathe into it and I just, by the will of God, expand it. Like, bring it up as much as we can. Let's bring it forward.

Do you say that, by the will of God?

Absolutely. Like, help. And I, a lot of times I'm like, Jesus, like, help me out here, man.

Thank you for taking this.

Yeah, I need, like, I need a hand. And it's not taking it. It's actually letting me fully feel it. Because here's what happens to us as men. Yeah, we don't allow ourselves to feel because of all the reasons you and I have talked about— your childhood, my childhood, conditioning around us, what we've been told, all those things. But when we go into stillness and we breathe and we allow it to come up and we intensify the feeling, not push it down— when my face gets hot, I'm like, okay, let's make it hotter. Let's bring it all in. When I start feeling tears rolling down my face, I'm like, let's have as many come through as possible. Like, I'm not going to hold them back. When I start— my body starts shaking, or my hands start shaking, or I feel like expression in the body and I have to move, I move as much as I need to. And I stay there until that feeling has come forth. It's affected me. I felt it. And then, you know what's so crazy? Like, I know there's therapists listening to this and psychiatrists that are like, that's the most dangerous, dangerous thing ever suggested. No one should do that on their own. That's just crazy. Yeah, whatever. Because when you lay down and you actually let it come through and you breathe into it and you expand it and you get it to its peak, it's just like that curving containment. It peaks, and then almost as quickly as you're peaking, you can't feel it anymore. And it's like in medicine work, they say the only way out is through. And it's one of the laws of this society. The only way out is through. And so when you bring it up and fully experience it, you finally get it out of your body, and it's game-changing. Like, after those sessions, sometimes I'm a little tired. Yeah, but I feel lighter, right? I feel like I'm kind of floating a little bit. I might be exhausted, but I'm floating. And the next day is always a day of like— sometimes when loops come up, I'm like, yes, I'm gonna go get this! Because the next day is like creativity. And intuition and inspiration and the word of God coming through me. Like, so much of what I'm doing now is divinely guided, but I feel like it's because I'm no longer suppressing— sorry, I feel like I'm no longer suppressing, I'm no longer cutting off, I'm no longer like holding back who I am. And I've created a space where God can be with me. I've created a space where Jesus can sit next to me. And I know this is controversial, but every morning I call in Mary Magdalene because I really think his story was a story of divine union. And she, she's been erased from history in such a violent way that it's ridiculous. And when I feel into Jesus in the personal times that I've been with him, I know that she's just important as she is. It's divine masculine and divine feminine. And the story got distorted into control and the story got distorted into this is how you have to behave. But what it was, was a love story of how we actually can become we are.

So much to be felt in what you just shared, Josh.

Thanks for creating a space where I feel like I can be vulnerable, man.

Oh man, I mean, this is honestly why I'm alive. It is to be able to have shared realness with people that want it, with people that are desiring shared realness. And so it's a testament to you In closing, I will say that when you were brilliantly sharing, there was this quote that kept repeating for me over and over and over again when you were bringing up Jesus and Mary Magdalene and the feeling of your emotions. And it was this quote that I've heard that says that joy is the matriarch of all emotions, but she won't enter the house unless all of her children are welcome. Yeah. Which is so— such a hard sentence to really land if you don't, if you don't understand what that is. And I don't know who said it, maybe it was— who knows? I mean, wisdom is all borrowed, right? But if joy is the matriarch of all emotion and she won't feel safe to enter unless all of her children are welcome, it's like, how much— how many homes— I mean, I came from a home like that, you know. How many homes are are not welcome for the people that live inside them. Yeah, because men have been taught for millennia to not only not feel their emotions, but to repress them and suppress them. And it seems to me like the only way out of this is through all of our energy in motion. You know, second law of thermodynamics, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transmuted. And metabolized and metabolized, digested. Yeah. Vaporized, moved on to something. So, so like, yeah, we covered so much ground. Um, grateful for you, the man that you are, the path you've chosen. What did we miss?

Well, I think there's probably a lot of men out there that want to know what to do next.

Absolutely.

Is that okay to share?

Before we get to that though, do you think in the teachings and in the brotherhood and everything else What do you feel like we didn't cover? I feel like we covered a really good amount. Is there anything that your heart, that your consciousness wants to share about containment and about any wisdom as parting guidance?

I think that what I've learned about containment is that it's the most healing force there is. And the misconception is that it's healing for you and her and not you. And masculine containment, a man stepping into his full power, affects the nervous system across from him in a profound way. And I absolutely know in my body, in my heart, in my relationship, and in the men I'm coaching, that it creates a level of healing that most people would tell you is not possible. But I think what's so important, and I just want to make sure we reinforce it, is that when you sit in that space of providing containment and you dominate yourself by understanding that you are safe and you hold yourself in that space, you will rewire your nervous system. You will cure childhood trauma. You will break ancestral chains in such a way that there will be a before and an after that you will have a felt sense of that will change everything. Anything. And I know these concepts are new, and I know they can be confusing, and I know they can bring up discordance and objections and all those types of things. But I'm totally willing to share all the keys to the kingdom. I put all of the Brotherhood documents right on my Facebook page and let everybody read them. There's nothing held back because such a big part of this is that you can't do it alone. We acquire our trauma in relationship and we heal it in relationship.

Absolutely.

And it's not just man and woman. It's like finding a brotherhood, finding a place where other men will hold you. And I get emotional because I start thinking of all the transformation I've seen and all the growth I've seen. It's where other men will hold you and validate you and see you and hear you. And you will feel the parts of you that are no longer you and never have been. Fall away at a speed that might be disorienting, but you'll get your feet underneath you and you'll understand who you've always been.

Where do they go?

So our website is thebrotherhoodsociety.com, and the process is you fill out an application to get on an interview. We're, we're a true society. This is not a product with an open cart. You actually have to go through some stuff to get into the Brotherhood. We don't take everybody, and there are people that we've asked not to join. And there's an application, and then there's an interview call. And on that interview call, you can show up in any level of expression that you want to, other than judgment of other human beings. And if you show up in a way where you're telling us your wife doesn't matter, or if you show up in a way where you're telling us that you can only have certain kind of people around you, or you don't accept people who are from another race or another country or speak a different language or a different color, like even come to us. We're not interested because the Brotherhood, everyone is equal. And I'm not just— I'm the person leading the calls, but I'm also the first member. And I don't walk in front of anybody. We walk side by side. And if you're not willing to take that posture with every single man in the container, do not even apply. I don't want you. I don't want you near us. You will affect the energetic of everything that we're doing. And this is going to be the biggest men's movement in history. It will survive past me, and it will change the world, and it will be remembered. And so if you're interested, you apply, you'll be on an interview call, and then you'll be invited to a 10-week initiation. And if you complete that initiation, you will be invited to join the Brotherhood for life. And it's thebrotherhoodsociety.com. If anything that I've said has moved you and you're more curious than you are judgmental— and even if you are carrying a ton of judgment, yeah, even if you're in judgment, even if you're in judgment, that's okay. Judgment of me is okay. Judgment of the content is okay, feeling like I'm wrong is okay, as long as you're accepting of everyone else's on their journey in the Brotherhood. Come and let us help you. Let us heal you. Let us hold you in truth, in trust, in vulnerability, and contained masculine energy. You won't be the same afterwards.

Thanks for being my friend. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks for sharing your wisdom. Y'all go to that URL, it's on the screen right now. And I just want to presence that we all have a choice to step into our fullness, all right, and heal. But I also want to leave space that it's okay if it's so overwhelming that I'm not here to shame you for not choosing that path.

100%. Um, and when it's time, you can.

When it's time, you know, many people have, um, repressed memories come up later in their life when they're in their 40s, 50s, 60s. They have childhood stuff come up. So there's no perfect time to do the work. But I will say that if in your neural tree, if in your body you're feeling what Alex is saying, then it's a beautiful time to start and you're in a safe place to start. So my man, thank you for being my friend, mentor, guide. Thank you for— thank you, God, for allowing Alex to be in my life. And until we see you again next week, I'm wishing you love, wellness, but most importantly, Peace and power. You cannot have power unless it comes from peace. We'll see you next week.