Healing The Masculine Wound with Josh Trent

Mr. Josh Trent, how you doing, buddy? So amazing. Thank you for having me in your home, in your studio. Uh it feels fun to have been interviewed by you and then just get to roll reverse. Yeah. We get to know each other deep in these conversations. Yes. And it's such a cool thing to just meet your family. You have great kids. Thank you. And uh and and great wife. So well let's let's start there. How has marriage been a conduit for your own Growth and transformation.

When I was a single man, I was very selfish and I did everything from a hedonistic perspective where I would. feed the part of myself that was a hungry ghost that just wanted to feel pseudo peace without actually feeling real peace. And when I met my wife six years ago, um, it was tumultuous from the jump because there was deep love there, but yet there was patterns on both sides. And I can only claim my own.

But I had this really deep pattern of anger towards women and anger towards the feminine that took quite a while to surface. And I find that most people that listen to your podcast and my podcast in some way are carrying what I was carrying when I met my now wife. And that is a part of myself that I wasn't ready to look at.

And the part of Josh that has become more aware can now look back on the version of Josh that was hiding and coping and doing all these things to have a a pseudo sense of control. was really just operating from fear. I was afraid. I was a little boy in the shell of a man. I'm six foot two thirty, so like I'm a large man.

But I had a law a small young boy in there that was at the wheel and he was running the show for quite some time. So marriage for me has been the ultimate crucible and having children. Of being honest with Josh. about what's really happening inside of me and what's really the fruits of my life.

Being directed back to me. And it's through my wife's feminine guidance. She's a she's a fucking oracle. She really is an oracle. She has shown me things about myself that I honestly never would have seen. if it wasn't for my marriage and being with her. What have you learned about yourself? What maybe maybe speak to some of the the impasses that created conflict where it was like, okay

Maybe this isn't gonna work or is it gonna work and what was coming up inside of you?'Cause I think for a lot of men,'cause what I w what I heard and what you were saying is I came into this relationship with uh kind of Severed or injured relationship to women. Yeah. And and that Affected how I related to my wife. So what were some of those injuries that you carried in previously into the relationship with your wife?

Yeah, the the the first injury was was being born to a mother that was struggling and still is struggling with uh manic bipolar disease. And so My heart goes out to anybody that deals with that. And I can speak to my heart right now and say it has been my biggest blessing, but also my biggest challenge in my life to to be the son of a mother who struggles with her own mental health. And how that showed up was I felt like for a lot of my life I had to be her father.

So I had to morph and sacrifice my own childhood and adolescence to be a father to my mother. Was your dad in the picture or was he He left when when I was young. I mean there's ambiguity there, but I think it's in the first couple months when I was born.

And so I always had this deep wound or feeling or essence that something interstitially was off and that the world wasn't a safe place. And there's been a ton, like literally my whole life's work, but especially this uh the podcast that I that I have has been ten years of deep therapy to point me back to the truth that My mother actually did the best she could with what she had, her level of consciousness and development.

She came from parents that, you know, my grandfather fought in World War Two. They were a very like stiff upper lip, like, you know, suck it up and just live life and who cares about feelings. And I think I can sense that She really never wanted that. I think my mother wanted a a familial structure where

Things could be shared, emotions could be processed. There was safety in her home. And so, like all of us do, she unconsciously created what she was angry about in my childhood structure, and the same with my brother. And so uh that was probably the the biggest piece that I brought into my marriage is that women aren't safe. Women can't be trusted.

But it's so ridiculous because I had this moment recently. We got married this year in Hawaii and I was looking at my wife and I I had a breakthrough. We we actually were about to break up.

Because she could feel something in me that I couldn't feel and it was that she didn't want me to be her father and she didn't want to pay for the sins of my mother wound, quite frankly. And so I came to this realization in apology and grief and processing of what was there. And I just looked right at her and I said, You know, I know now I know now that you are not my mother and you are not all women. You are my woman. Mm. There's a core difference there where I was able to

psychosomatically section it off and break her away from lumping her into a category where she is all women. Yeah. And as you know from the young gain psychology, it's like that internal experience of me is my mom.

So my mom taught me about the inner world and like what's going on with my emotions, because I and her are one and the same in early developmental stages. And so I took ownership for that. I was able to and this is just this year. I mean, in September of this is coming out in twenty twenty five, twenty twenty six, but this just happened. And I look back on all the ways in which this bubble, this beach ball that I was holding in the pool under the water, it was so much effort.

with so much effort to hold this wound and not actually feel this wound. Quite frankly, I didn't know how to feel it because I had used my podcast as a way to intellectualize my healing. That's the first thing. And then the second thing was I didn't have enough experience in actually being honest about what was going on in me. I didn't have the skill set to be able to feel it. speak it and move through it. It just wasn't a thing.

But I realized that the biggest curse in my life has actually been the biggest blessing with my marriage because this curse of being born to a a bipolar mom isn't a curse at all. It was just, as Aristotle says, nature abores a vacuum. I was sucked into a vacuum of something that's so painful. Like imagine Mark Wallen was doing a session with me and he said, You know, when you were being raised by your mom, it was almost like she was driving a car off a cliff.

And you were in the backseat screaming, feeling like you were gonna die. Mm-hmm. And so when your wife, when Carrie brings up any emotion in your marriage that's not happy or trustable, That you immediately time travel and you go back to a state where you're on the back of a car going off a cliff and you feel like you're gonna die. So there's been many, many, many moments like that of spiritual teachers and mentors and guests on my podcast that have been really my own high-level therapy.

that have brought me now to this place where I can be with my wife and be able to experience all of her emotions. I'm not perfect with that. Right. But I would say I'm I'm batting a really good average there. Because I can actually be a container for her being a woman without projecting onto her the fact that she's my mom, she's not trustable, and women are crazy. And I would be suffice to say, if you look at the research and especially in your work.

most men that aren't conscious to what I'm speaking about are doing what I was doing. And they're doing it in ways where they think it's the woman and they think it's her. But the moment that God Universe Mentorship high level input comes in. You have to be able to look into the mirror and take ownership for that which you have been behaving. And that was the big piece for me. I mean, there's been many, but that was a pretty profound one. Well, say say more about what it was like to be a boy.

growing up with a mom who was struggling because I think You know, a lot of the men that I've worked with over the years, it's like mom had severe anxiety, mom was depressed, mom was

super angry and hostile. Mom was disconnected. I mean, I grew up with um you know, a mom who struggled with substance abuse. Um, and so say more about what that was like for you. It was like trying to take care of a squirrel who had had four shots of espresso. Um there's a there's a visual. And then some days it was like trying to take care of a squirrel who would just want to sleep all day. So so with with mental health disorders of any kind.

Um and what I didn't know as a child that I know now that I've actually th the beauty of this is it informs my work in emotional epigenetics because I'm able to go back and do timeline therapy and be with this younger version of Josh and hold him and speak to him and be there for him. In moments like I'm gonna share. There's one specific moment where um I remember it was like a day long and my mom was screaming in her room and she just kept saying, Jesus help me, like screaming, screaming.

My brother and I were like playing video games and eating cereal, going like, what the hell is going on right now? So that was one memory. And then another memory when I was about eleven years old, I remember she was getting carried out of the house on a stretcher because she had had a a big episode.

And I will never forget the feeling of fear and the feeling of anger that I had because my grandparents were there and they were trying to placate it. They were trying to to say, Oh, your mom's fine, you know, she'll be okay. And meanwhile inside of this young psyche, there was just a boy who was craving the truth. Right. Like what is the truth of this moment? And why are these adults acting this way? What's really going on with my mom? And so, you know, in a perfect storm.

Through that experience, I really developed a coping mechanism that if I'm going to be safe, I have to create my own safety at any cost. Right. At any cost. And then when I was about thirteen, I think somebody showed me a Playboy and I'd seen some Playboys on my dad's table and all of a sudden I was like transcended into this playground.

Where I'm like, oh, pubic hair, a vagina. Wow. This is so cool. This takes me away from this sadness and grief and anger that I'm feeling. So I'll just go deep into this magazine and then VHS. And then when internet came along, it was like lights out.

you know, game over. Because then the coping strategy became an unconscious way of being that really facilitated decades of sabotage. Honestly. I I like to say that I'm I'm uh very grateful that I grew up in the era era of dial up, you know? That I like I I can't remember who I was I was talking to like a sex And I'm like, you know I

inadvertently learned edging early on because it was like watching the fucking porn, you know, slowly load up. But I you know, I as I'm listening to you, it really sounds like You were shielded from the truth. Yeah. Which as a kid, that's so distorting and and disorienting. Because it's like you can see objectively. Something's wrong. Yeah. And then but you are being told that that's everything's fine, everything's okay.

And I think that that's what a lot of young boys experience, right? It's like their parents are having trouble, they're going through divorce, it's like everything's okay, everything's fine.

And I understand wanting to shield a child from the hardship. Yeah. But maybe just talk to what that made you question about relationships or life or what it means to be human or or a man. I have distinct memories of looking up in the sky'cause I thought that's where God lived at that time. And I kept saying like, Fuck you, God, how could you let this happen?

What what did you bring me into? What is this? Where is my dad? He gets this woman pregnant and then leaves? What the hell is going on? You leave me with this bipolar woman as a child? What the fuck? So there was that awareness. And then there was also the awareness of like, okay, what do I do now?

What do I do now? I'm being bullied at school. I'm overweight because food became a coping source as well. Chronic sinus issues, like the wheels totally falling off the wagon. And it wasn't until I was in my early twenties that I was working as a mechanic actually, not even in my genius at all. Like I was like, I'll get this safe job, I'll just work on Mercedes Benz and like make good money what I thought. And I my soul kept screaming at me so loud of like

There's more to life than this. That message, like, you know, the stock market, how it has those ticker tapes. Yeah, yeah. There would be a message when I'd wake up in the morning at this mechanic job and it would just be like, There's more to life than this. This isn't where you're supposed to be. So I just said, All right, I sold everything I owned and I moved to Hawaii. And I was like, I'm going to get this body well.

So I hiked and I surfed and I fished and I just spent time in the ocean. You know, my I think I was twenty, four years old. And I learned surfing and I was so cooled by the feminine energy of the ocean. It was such a cooling experience of like this beautiful uh grandmother energy that I had never really felt. And I found training. I was I was working out at a 24 hour fitness and this fitness manager came up to me and he was like

Hey, uh you're getting good results. Have you ever thought about being a trainer? And I was like, What's a trainer? I didn't even know what personal training was. I did that for ten years, but when I did that for ten years, I was bottled with that beach ball I mentioned to you of all these things, these emotions that I had no conduit, I had no um arbiter of feelings to actually experience.

And that led to deeper levels of pornography addiction, extreme womanizing, like it's not I'm not like proud to say this, but like uh double or triple digits of being with women unconsciously. Right. And it's funny because that was really celebrated back then. You know, my friends and I would joke, like, who did you have sex with last night? Just a very unconscious way of being.

And I look back on that version of Josh and go, wow, like you literally didn't know what you didn't know. Like I I I'm so grateful for that version of Josh who was addicted to porn, who was coping with all these things, because if I didn't have those coping strategies,

I don't think I'd want to be around anymore. There was many moments where I I I didn't necessarily have a suicidal moment where I wanted to leave the earth. But there was many moments where I was just like, There's no point to life. Yeah. This is just a a a jail cell. I d I don't really enjoy being here.

And then I had a couple other heroes' journeys that really knocked me on my ass and that led me to you here. There's a big story there. But but yeah, that was essentially the crux of your question is is um the the the feelings that I didn't know how to feel.

that I didn't have the skill set to feel. And now I know wholeheartedly like my mission on earth is to feel my feelings, to help others do the same and to be curious and to speak the truth. I had no awareness of that back then. It wasn't a thing for me. It wasn't online. How did how did some of that start to show up when you met your now wife? Because it sounds like

I I mean this is very common. I did the same thing too, where it's you know, you sort of ignore the pain. Yeah. You know, ignore what you're the like dysfunctional relationship with women and the feminine and that just kind of carries on for a period of time and then eventually

you get to a place where I see this with a lot of men where either that's just not workable and you're not getting what you want relationally, or you fall in love with somebody that you're like, oh shit, I really want to make this work. But now I have all of this shit inside of me that I haven't dealt with that's fucking up the relationship that I'm in with this woman. Yeah. And

So it sounds like a little bit of both happened for you. I'm curious how did that start to show up in your relationship with your now wife from the beginning? Like Did you find yourself getting angry with her? Did you find yourself not being able to trust her emotions? Was she the problem in the relationship? Like talk to me a little bit about that because I think that'll help.

Contextualize it for for men. Yeah, pretty much everything you said. Okay. Option D, we can just put that on the screen right now. Yeah, all the above. Um Yeah, it was this. Um, what I started to really notice is that my inability and my hypersensit my hypersensitivity to feminine mood or feminine criticism. became so apparent that I thought I can't do this anymore. And by this I mean not being honest with Josh, not feeling my feelings.

using pornography as a coping strategy and and honestly even using food still as a coping strategy. So these these coping strategies and I love this and I know you've heard this before. Gabor Mate has this metaphor of the hungry ghost. Yeah. So it's like you can keep feeding it and feeding it and feeding it, it'll never be satiated. Yeah. And that's what I started to be aware of is like there's a hungry ghost inside of Josh that will only actually be satiated when I can set that ghost free.

And the path to me setting that ghost free was me starting to lean in and be honest and speak it to my then girlfriend now wife about ways that I was out of integrity. And it was both terrifying.

And liberating at the same time. And that was really the genesis of the blooming of new neurons, the blooming of Josh. was being honest with my woman and being honest about the struggles that I was having. And, you know, she did her best to hold me through that, but she was dealing with her own stuff. And quite frankly, like it wasn't hers to hold. Yeah. It's mine to hold. And so I'm like so deeply grateful for my wife. Oh my gosh.

I'm so grateful for her because she was so patient, so loving. Yes, she has her stuff and had it then, but her ability to see my heart and and be present with me and love me and be in union with me now is the greatest champion of my life. It's the greatest part of my life. And that wasn't the case for a long time. I think your

Your life and what you're talking about really is a mirror for a lot of men. I think a lot of men get into relationships with somebody that they really love and they're confronted by the dysfunction that exists inside of them that is causing havoc in the relationship. And it's like I really want this to work. And I know that I'm Screwing it up. Mm-hmm. You know, I know that I'm doing things that's causing

collapse and conflict and disconnection, but I don't know how to fix it. And then that makes me feel shame and and I know that I'm contributing to some big problems in this and and then it can be so easy to just be like,

But she's this way. Totally. You know, did you find that coming out where it's like she's doing this and she's the problem? And it's how did you confront some of that? Cause I would imagine that it it took a a certain level of confrontation within yourself to be like No, like yes, she's got her own shit, but no, there's a huge part of this that I'm bringing to the table. Cause I think so many men have uh a deep well of shame around the

Their contribution to the dysfunction in the relationship. How did you deal with that? Cause I think that's a that's like such a tender place to be. But I think it's also the place where so many men get stuck. Yeah. You know, is in that like fuck, I'm causing a huge amount of dysfunction here. When I found David Data's work in twenty twelve and I got into men's groups in twenty fourteen.

That was an opening that I didn't even know existed. It was from a guy named Johnny Blackburn and and Cinitas and he had actually trained with John Wyland and and they learned from data together. And I started to read the way of the superior man. And h the concepts that he was bringing forth just made no sense. Like, what the hell is this guy talking about? What does he mean my woman is mirroring back to me my behavior? What does he mean that

That a woman is constantly changing. What does he mean? Like I just didn't understand it. It was like trying to read a different language. Right. And so flash forward five years doing deep men's work in Encinitas, like literally twice a month, sitting with men, 10 men in circle. having a framework of uh impact and questions, having a structured framework really was of deep service. I mean, if I look back on my life, the the greatest healing happened for me in other circles of men.

Period, full stop. Yeah. They were able to see things in me and as Johnny being the leader at that time and other men being more seasoned. Now I I feel like I'm more seasoned. I've been leading a group here for four years in Austin. Uh, I was able to call in kind of quasi-mentorship from other men that had marriages and had children, had these things that I wanted, but I couldn't embody. I couldn't own it. It wasn't mine yet.

And I would learn that love is not a transaction. Love is not something that this person has to be a certain way in order for me to be okay. And these were very foreign concepts coming from a bipolar mother where I actually, from an entrainment perspective, had to make sure she was safe. Right. To make sure that I was safe. It was actually a survival paradigm that I was operating from. And so the unwinding of that in ten now f almost fifteen years of men's work.

has been so profound because it it enabled other men to give me true feedback on stuff they were seeing that I didn't have the consciousness or the awareness to see. And that was full stop the most important thing in my life. And then also having mentors just show up. Um I think I'm answering your question still, right? Yep.

Having mentors show up in ways that I was seeking them out and they were coming to me. I read this book, um, How to Know Outer Worlds from Rudolf Steiner and he said in the first passage of the book. that when the student is truly in integrity and their heart is in a pure place. about seeking higher wisdom that the mentor can't not share it with them. The mentor is called to share it with the student if they sense that the student's intention is pure. Yeah. And my intention was very pure.

But I was battling with so many coping strategies of this hungry ghost. That I just kept failing and falling forward and failing two steps forward, three steps back, five steps forward, seven steps back. And I got to this place that I just I in Hawaii when I came back and I I left training and I went to um corporate America of all places and I said, Oh, I'll just put my dream of like having my own business in a little box on the side.

And I'll just check on it every once in a while, but I'll just do this thing that's safe. Well, I got fired. from a job that I hated, I put my mom in a mental home and I broke up with a woman that I was dating that I thought I was gonna be with. And this all happened in the span of six months. So it was like true heroic journey of deep initiation. I was separated from that which I knew. I was initiated into something that literally I was living out of my car.

I have a photo of this to prove it. I had all my stuff, all my clothes and my little Subaru that's parked out in front of my house right now. Nice. And I just set up my podcast and I'm like, I cannot go one more moment. without launching this podcast and doing something that's true to my soul. I I just felt like God wanted me to to learn. by podcasting. I'd sat on the idea for like three years.

And I finally I bought a course. It was called Podcasters Paradise from John Lee Doumas. And I and I interviewed John Lee like years and years and years ago. Like one of the OGs in the space. And so to culminate this, I I launched the podcast in a spare bedroom. on some rickety ass cheap plastic stand. And one of my very first guests was Dr. John Gray. I don't know why he was able to talk to me at that time, but he was willing and he started to teach me about how women are.

And about how not just his famous book, you know, Mars Venus, but how to actually be with a woman. And then I interviewed Gay Hendricks and then the list kept escalating and going on and on. And I found as I interviewed more people that had higher levels of wisdom and true mentorship, like masculine leadership, I started to have that part of Josh that really missed the leadership and really missed the mentorship from my own father be filled.

And then once I had that place um more full, then I was able to go out with just a little bit more confidence in the world, but yet I still was dealing with these coping strategies and everything else. So it's just been this amalgamation of healing. and of really facing the truth, but it wouldn't have happened without men's groups and mentorship. Period. It there's just n I I don't believe for any man, and by the way, or woman, but specifically to men.

I don't believe that true introspection and healing and personal development, consciousness, awareness can happen without men's group and masculine mentorship. Yeah. I I don't see it being possible. Well it's so funny'cause so many men I mean, we have uh a community called the Alliance and it's basically a m it's a men's community, right? And there's a whole bunch of resources in there and blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, we've got

Almost a thousand guys in there. Probably by the time this comes out there'll be more than a thousand guys in there. Wow. And it's so funny to see how and I tell the guys like how you show up in the space is how you're probably showing up everywhere. But at the very least how you show up in this space is how you're showing up for yourself. And, you know, you were talking about that mentorship piece. And I've always found that r m really good mentors, they're not gonna chase you down.

Like you really have to be in this energetic place of I'm ready to receive what you have to give and what you have to teach. Yeah. And it's so funny to see men come into that space and say, I'm ready to do the work, but

there's this resistance that shows up of I'm ready to do the work and I'll do the courses that are in here and I'll do some of the pathways and I'll do some of that kind of work. But then to show up on the call with me. And to get into the arena is like so confronting for so many of the men. you know, because there's this layer of receiving some type of direction. And I remember having I mean, I've had three really potent mentors in my life.

And the resistance that I would feel, even though I was like, I know you have something that I fundamentally and undeniably need. Yeah. But the resistance towards allowing myself to do that because there's shame and there's you know, there's self judgment and it's just like we it must mean that I'm broken, right? It must mean that I'm fucked up, that I need somebody else to support me or guide me.

So maybe speak to that because I think you're what you're talking about is the the kind of break with the trust in the masculine and You know, I think we all as men know that to bridge that gap between the boy and the adolescent man. into a mature man requires us to

be in relationship with other men, with elders, with men that are further along the path in some way, and to receive some type of transmission from them. And I think that that's I think it's an underrated underrated difficulty that we as men have with this resistance of I'm gonna receive this type of wisdom or direction or or um

challenge from another man that really has my best interest in mind. That's the kind of weird part about it. So can you just speak to that, that sort of like core masculine wounding and the resistance that shows up? uh or maybe that has showed up for you in that space of I want to receive mentorship, I want to receive guidance and what that journey was like for you. Wow, that's such a loaded question. It's a good one. Um

Let me preframe it by this. So what I've been learning over the past two years is this concept of emotional epigenetics. Mm-hmm. And that means that our DNA is fixed, but our epigenome turns on and off certain factors of our genes. that either wire us for trust or wire us for trauma. And trauma, I just use that as stuck energy, energy and motion, emotion.

And so what I've learned is that whether it's the rodent study that was done, I believe it was twenty fourteen, where they shock the male rodent and they would have it smell cherry blossoms. And then they would measure the hypervigilance and the neural system two generations down and they actually prove that just by the the offspring in two generations smelling the cherry blossom.

that they would have a fear response. Now, I know we're not rats, but if you look at that data and and many more, all of the things that we are encoded with from the birth and going way back, there's actually research that shows seven generations. Um I bring that to my both quest for mentorship and my resistance to it. Because on an epigenetic level, if I'm expressing trauma or stuck energy or hypervigilance of I can I trust this person.

Then my focus on can I trust this person would cloud the very wisdom that they're trying to bring to me. So that's what I met on an epigenetic level. And I love this because I I think at the table there's room for science. I know you go deep into science, but there's also just room for spirituality and God. Like both of these things are explainable yet

The the point in a man and the point in me that's actually able to receive mentorship can only happen when I finally let go and just trust God. We can focus on the science and there's a whole deep well of it. The reason I'm so passionate about emotional epigenetics is because I think as men, we want the the how and the why. We want the structure of how it works first. Yeah. And so if I can give men and women the structure of how epigenetics are expressed and which genes are turned off and on and

show them the research, it can allow them to have curiosity of, oh well, maybe that's why I act the way I act. Maybe that's why even when my wife or husband loves me and they're showing me love. that I have a somatic response that's the opposite. And so it's just a way for people to be curious about the way their epigenome is expressing in real time. And so that's the preframe to your question. Now, how did I actually receive the mentorship?

I got to be honest about what I was feeling and tell my mentor what I was feeling. So um in sessions with Johnny Blackburn and I'll shout him out right now, just recently this year, Alex Charfin, a good friend of mine, said something that just Made me so angry and so like I wanted to hide. He said, everything that you want in your life. Money, health, marriage, sex, everything is on the other side of masculine containment. And I didn't know what that meant. And I was like,

What what the fuck are you even talking about, dude? What is this ambiguous thing? Yeah, there's another David Data moment where he's bringing forth this golden gobulet, and I'm like, nah, I'm gonna I'm gonna hang out over here with my resistance, you know? And and it wasn't until I put it to practice of like, it's okay that my wife is how she is. I don't need my wife to act in only two emotions, you know, happiness or or appreciation or joy. I don't need that from her.

What I get to do to practice masculine containment is to be able to be with her and not allow her vortex or her emotions to be worn by me. Yeah. I think that's essentially what containment really is. I mean, there's many other factors, but But true containment that I've learned through mentorship, through Alex. has been this process of practicing how to breathe when she's triggered.

be with her and just say, Tell me more about that or be curious about her experience instead of Judging her experience. projecting my stuff onto it because I'm afraid of my own feelings in the presence of hers that aren't happiness and joy. And that's a really big one for all men to learn, by the way. Totally. I think all men, I think the final frontier And and especially what you teach and and what I'm starting to understand that's epigenetically expressed in our in our body.

is understanding that our feelings are actually this beautiful gateway. They're this awesome bridge.

for us to be honest in the moment with somebody we love. Yeah. Because they're gonna feel it whether or not we're being honest about it anyways. So we may as well just develop the skills to feel it. Right. And that's really what you're definitely here to do, I'm here to do is like, all right, in every unique situation in my life, whether it's through mentorship or through my own practices of spirituality and development.

How can I get closer to shortening the pain curve or shortening the learning curve?

of how long it takes me to repair or how long it takes me to just be in the presence of her. I think those two factors are really important because that's the mirror that life is shining back to me. That's the way I can judge the fruits of my life. is by her feeling safe and feeling like she can be and express whoever she is.

And also the beauty of this in the healing is my s my children watching it. My children seeing me hold space for her, hold space for them, be a container that has no bottom, that's not a hungry ghost. Because I finally found a way to let go of that ghost so it doesn't have to be fed. Yeah. Ha after having done this work for uh such a long time now and worked with so many men.

I really think that one of the challenges that we face is that we as men, not maybe not you and I and some of the men that you know, that that I know, but for many men they the quality of their relationship with other men will dictate the quality of relationship with themselves. Or at the very least is a kind of mirror for the relationship that they have with themselves. And so many men have these

very shallow relationships with them. I mean, I I had that for so long, where it's like the dudes in my life, they had no idea what was going on inside of me. They had no idea what was going on inside of my relationship. And

It was either highlight reel or complaints. And it was it's just those two things, right? It's like everything's amazing. It's so wonderful. Here's how great all these things are going in my life. Or Here's the complaints that I have with the woman that I'm dating. Yeah. And and it's just a kind of like very narrow bandwidth. And I do think that there's, you know, there's this sort of cliche of iron sharpens iron, but I think it's I think it's deeper than that. I think that it's

We learn how to be competent, functional, expansive men by really being in deep relationship with other men. Yeah. And the our willingness to do that to see another man to understand him, to understand the challenges that he's going through, to be able to expose ourselves the the truth of what we're dealing with and struggling with. and know that that man's going to stay in relationship with us. is incredibly healing, you know, but it's but it's also at the at the same time

It's very confronting. You know, it's really, really confronting'cause there's always this little bit of like, Am I competing with you? Right. You know, am I in competition with you right now? Will you think less of me if I tell you

that, you know, this part of my relationship isn't working very well or that the finances aren't going well or my health is actually shit or, you know, I've been jerking off and watching porn fucking five times a week. Like I think that that's That's the barrier for most men to have better relationships with other men. And I think that that depressurizes.

the relationships that we have with the women if we're in a heterosexual dynamic. It depressurizes that because then it's not all on that primary relationship with your girlfriend or your woman or your wife to Allow all of you to be there. This is I love the this is one thing that I learned from John Gray. He has the love letters that you write to your partner.

And he also has a pre frame of n he actually said this on my podcast. He was like, Never complain to your woman, but there's a caveat. Cause most men hear that. They're like, What? What do you mean? ever complain to my woman. So some guys are like, yay. You're not off the hook, bro. Yeah. Um but what I'm saying, what what's deeper, so it's it's a yes and.

So the the the deeper context is when you do bring something to your wife that you'd like to improve or be curious about, that there's a structure in which you bring it to her. Yeah. And this is the really beautiful part about being able to still be yourself in relationship, but also holding a container as a man. So the the frame is,

You know, my love, this is what I'm experiencing. It's just basic nonviolent communication. This is what I'm experiencing. When this happened, I felt this way. So it's just naming it the I, which is the opposite of what we're taught, you know. We're taught like, you know, go in and point the finger because we we see what what is modeled. Yeah. We learn what is modeled. Unconsciously, that's what everything is created by, whether we want to admit it or not.

And so the way to to generationally twist this one eighty is to use N V C. And I remember I I interviewed somebody that had trained with Marshall Rosenberg and he's like, You're either a a giraffe or a jackal. You know, giraffes stick their necks out and they're vulnerable. And they use certain language to explain sticking their neck out. And it looks like this. When this happened I felt this way.

Is there a possibility that we could create a different reality? Or can you tell me that in a different way so that I can feel less pain? If you come to a woman like that, she's if she's conscious She's gonna respond. I mean, that's a beautiful mirror, right? Now, if I came to my wife and I said, When you said this, it pissed me off. I can't believe you said that, then her defenses are gonna come up. Yeah. That's not a safe space.

So, and then at the very end, it's just great. So how can we create this together? Or how can I support this happening more often? Right. Just, just, and I didn't use exact NVC language, but that's the crux of it. And so that's a really big piece for me and I think for men of what you're talking about is it's not that we can't ever complain to our woman. It's not that we can't ever voice our concerns.

It's just what is the structure and what is the come from, the intentionality of which I'm bringing something to her that actually is just really cool because we can be curious about a rupture, we can be curious about pain instead of having pain. activate and trigger all of our wounds of survival, which came from epigenetic expression that goes seven years back. Well I think it's interesting because in a lot of ways, one of the most confusing things that I hear men talk about or ask is

Yeah, my girlfriend's telling me to open up more. You know, my wife's telling me to share more with her. She's telling me that I need to be more vulnerable. And the the next part of that is always a question which is How the fuck do I do that? Like what does that actually mean? And I think that you're describing it, right? It's like here's how you actually tell your partner what's happening inside of you, what's going on, to be real, to be transparent.

without passing passing burden onto them of saying like Fix this for me. And I think what happens for a lot of men is because they don't have substantial relationships with other men. They turn their their girlfriend or their wife into like an emotional processing center where it's like, I feel all this stuff. I don't know what to do with it.

And you've given me the permission to open up now. So now I'm gonna open up. I'm gonna give you everything that I'm feeling in the hopes that you can help me process what the hell's going on. And that creates this mother son dynamic.

You know, and it turns her into this very like maternal role. And then the you know, she doesn't also feel safe because she's like, Now I'm having to tend to your emotions and she doesn't want to have sex with you either. Yeah, and and then she doesn't want to have sex with you. And so it's a really complicated thing because I think for a lot of guys, it's like, well Then I'll just hold them in, right? I'll just hold them in. So can you maybe just go a little bit deeper into How can a man be?

open up. What does it look like for him to be vulnerable? What does it look like for him to be transparent?

And maybe talk a little bit more about containment. Because I think this is something I've seen online. I see like the YouTube comments that are on my videos and sometimes or the interviews where guys are like, Oh, so I just have to like you're telling me that I I like I have to be in complete control of my emotions at all time and even when I'm expressing myself to my wife or my girlfriend that I just have to be completely contained, but it's okay for her to be

dysregulated or emotional and there's like the animosity comes out. Yeah. I mean, for every man, would you place your wife and children or your girlfriend in a car with no steering wheel that was going eighty miles an hour the wrong way down a freeway? The answer is no. You ha you wouldn't do it. So, first thing is put the steering wheel on, control the car.

Slow the car down, move it to the side of the road, then invite your wife in, then invite your woman in. I'm I'm giving a metaphor, but essentially what I'm saying is be attuned to your own experience of what's actually happening inside of your body, then Once you have a grasp on what that is, and by the way, it could be a minute, it could be a week, who knows?

Just use communication with your wife um or with your girlfriend and just say, Hey, you know what? I'm feeling a whole bunch of stuff right now. Before I share it with you, I wanna go do work with it and I wanna learn from it. Is it okay if I come back to you tomorrow at twelve o'clock?

Especially for an anxious attachment style, that's gonna be candy for them. Right. They're gonna be like, Oh yeah, we'll talk tomorrow at noon. Great. Yeah. Then do your work and sit with it. I have found that in my life, man, mentorship that we talked about sitting with men and breath work specifically.

um have a program called Breathe Breath and Wellness and we have eleven hundred students that have gone through it over five years. And when I found breath work, it was actually through a Navy SEAL commander, Mark Devine, of all places. Who's this Navy SEAL commander teaching breath work?

I I gravitated towards Mark at that time in 2016 because I was like, wow, he really has an embodiment of something that I'm working on. And so I I sought out his mentorship and I I went to his unbeatable mind retreat. And I'm sitting there, I'll never forget this. I'm sitting on the floor with like, Special ops and rangers. And I'm all of a sudden I'm like, what is this water coming out of my mouth? I was crying, I was emoting.

And I didn't know it at the time, but that unlocked a huge piece of my development where wow, when I can breathe, I can choose. It's it's actually written on my arm in Italian, Se posso respirare posso scegliere, which means if I can breathe, I can choose. And so it's this homage of wow, the the very thing that's right under my nose that actually turns down the volume of my default mode network.

that actually takes me out of fight or flight that's both voluntary and involuntary. It's the only lever we have. It's amazing breath work. It's truly the most incredible thing. that I can actually attune myself and breathe and go into meditation or sit in red light or just go out into nature, do a workout, do cold therapy, do something, put the energy that's stuck, the stuck emotion that feels traumatic.

Put that energy in motion in motion. And then when we put the energy in motion, the wisdom comes through. But the wisdom can't ever come through unless we put it into motion. Right. And so that's the big one is like put put the energy in motion. Stop the car, then invite your woman in, then invite her in and say, Hey, here's what I've learned about myself. Here's the ways that I haven't been showing up. Here's what's going on in me when this event happened.

Like can't you just feel the peace in that? It's just so different of a way to operate than clenching my jaw and having to crick my neck and like

Like fight the wheel. Meanwhile, I'm the one driving the car the whole time. It's been me the whole time and it always shall be. So so calm the car down and then I want to speak to what you said because there's this bifurcated illusionary bullshit war of like Andrew Tate and the Red Pill and the Fifth Wave Feminists that are just feeding this thing of like men neither either need to cry in their woman's lap

Or they need to stuff it down and watch porn. There's a middle, and the middle is exactly what we're talking about today. And that middle takes time. And I think for so long I was so angry at myself for not being in the middle, or or even not even having the skill set to be in the middle.

that I would judge myself. And then that would actually induce a shame spiral. But then of course I wasn't ready to feel my shame either. So then I would show up sabotaging relationships, still doing coping mechanisms, all because of this one simple fact. that I didn't know how to put the steering wheel on the car and pull it to the side of the road before I bring it to my woman. That's the main thing. And if everybody can take this home, like learn through development how to do that.

And I promise you, everything will get better. Your money, your body, your women, your children, like everything works when we do that. Yet. If we're not cautious, if we're not careful, society comes in with its little hooks and it says, You're pissed off at your wife, go drink. You're angry, go watch porn. You're frustrated, go drink at the bar with your buddies on the weekend. It will feed that part of the ego so deeply.

that we will become a fucking prisoner of our own creation. Yeah. And that is a big lesson for all of us as men. And I I'm here to tell you, I don't think that those hooks ever go away. I think they're kind of always there. Like I heard this phrase, the devil's in the corner always doing push ups when it comes to pornography. And the only way that we win the war of self and of love with our women

Is actually by nourishing the five parts of us. And that's why in my programs I have what's called the wellness pentagon. It's the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual pentagon. Part of self. that actually gets to be fed. These five domains are so important. I have to give homage to Paul Czech because he taught me about mental, emotional, spiritual And physical, I added financial onto that to make it a Pentagon because my biggest learning curve that drove my pornography.

was actually my fear of financial ruin. I grew up uh with a mom who didn't work, I grew up on welfare, and so there's been a lot of uncoiling so I can feed that financial part of myself. And we're here living proof. I mean, I'm not super mega wealthy, but like I built my studio on my land. We have this beautiful home. Like we're in abundance. You know, it's here. And so now my work is to continually feed these five domains in my life.

And to share how I'm doing that with my audience and with my students. And it's such a gift, man. Do I have it completely mastered? No. I I think it's mastery of self or mastery for self. And I think that mastery for self is way more empowering than trying to master the self. Mastering the self is like putting the self in a box.

mastering of or mastering for the self is so much more empowering. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I think uh I talk a lot about self leadership and developing that as a skill set, you know, and that's so for so many men They are feeling a lack of self worth because they have terrible impulse control, they aren't able to make good decisions. They feel like they're not

at the wheel of their own car. And so they lack these sort of like basic leadership skills that historically we we have looked to men to teach us. You know, that that is the role of the fathers. Like, here's to to sort of push us to take healthy risks. To push us to make good decisions, to push us to rein in the impulse control. And I think that's so many men have lacked that. And I I think from an epigenetic standpoint,

You know, one of the things that I've talked about as well is, you know, we are we're coming out of the wake of you and I were raised by men who were raised by the men that fought in World War Two. Yeah. That were taught the slogans of you know, suck it up, who were taught uh the the man up, right? Which was like, go get in the tanks to go and die. You know, they they were all of these sayings and there was this huge sacrifice where men literally had to sever themselves off.

from any type of emotionality to just go and do what was necessary, to go and fight a war. And that's that has a very real impact. You know, I my grandfather fought in World War Two. He came back Not the same, right? He enlisted when he was nineteen years old. Uh, and then, you know, when the war was done he had met his his wife. She he was Canadian. Well, he was from Scotland but was in in Canada and she was in the UK. She was a nurse from the the British uh military.

And You know, and they started a family and they started as as farmers, right? But here's this man who has seen people die, who has been on the battlefield, who has been in pl you know, airplanes with soldiers watching them get killed around him as a twenty-year-old man who's had to kind of sequester away his emotions and And then raise three boys. You know? And it's like, well, you think about the impact that that man has then brought into raising his sons.

And and that those sons are then trying to compensate for that when they raise theirs. And so I I think that You know, I I think that as a culture and as a society, our generation of men are really coming out of this uh Like trauma soup, you know, that is just this wave

from two world wars that happened back to back and every single man was affected by it. Maybe not every single, but the majority of men was of were affected by it. Majority of women were affected by it. There are different impacts.

Um, I want to come back to that in a second. I do want to do like a little bit of a deeper dive in on the epigenetic side of things, but I want to come back to pornography because it's such a It's such a hidden driver of disconnection between men and their partners and men and then their sense of self.

their sense of purpose and mission. And it's something that I battled with that I've talked about. I see so many men battle with. What was your journey? What were you using it for? How did it start to impact your relationships? And then we can kind of talk about how did you actually create enough escape velocity to get out of it. Cause I think that's the big thing for men is like They can quit it for a period of time.

But they can't seem to create enough escape velocity to actually break out of the atmosphere and not return to it over and over and over and over again. There there's a biological part of the answer and there's also a spiritual collective part of the answer. Right.

I think it's a great segue actually because the men that go to war that come home with all these stuffage of feelings, they have no idea what to do anything with. They'll go right to porn. Yeah. Porn is like compl I think if you look at the research like It's almost three quarters of of military men that suffer with pornography. I don't have an exact data set on that, but it's just obvious, right? And and porn is glorified in our society. So we have a spiritual sickness component to this.

War is also a spiritual sickness as well. The justification of killing other people and pushing your emotions down. you know, in in Nazi Germany, they would feed them chocolate with methamphetamine so that the soldiers could actually disconnect and disassociate and kill other people. Most people don't know that. War and all these things in life that drive pornography is really um

biological in the fact that our limbic system and our brain a really great resource for any man who's struggling is Gary Wilson's Your Brain on Porn. A really solid resource because he goes deep into the neurology and how the limbic system actually wants to have what near ayal calls a variable reward.

It's the same reason why on our phones when we see the notification button that we're always gonna get a squirt of dopamine because it's a new novel stimuli. And so that's a great resource to start with. I don't know if you should say a squirt. Продолжение следует... Try the wrong wrong word on the wall. On the Mad Talk show, I could like hear half of my audience just laughing. Like ha squirt. Okay. Well technically it's a squirt. That's true. It is true.

So that that was funny. So that being said, like the reason why pornography it has such deep hooks, uh, and why it had it for me and why it has it for so many men. is because it offers this pseudo piece. It offers this pseudo Exhale or pseudo dopaminergic cycle.

That the limbic system can feed on and can kind of calm down what you had described as the elephant and the rider. Yeah. So the elephant inside of the body, it's a great metaphor. I'd never heard that before. I love it. The elephant are our somatic.

Is trying to deal with all of this stuck energy, whether you look at Michael Edward Johnson's latch theory about smooth muscle tissue, whether you go into Bessel Vanderkoch's work, whether you look at Sarah Baldwin and time travel, it's all the same thing. Essentially what's happening is there are packets of information, of data that are stored in the body, and the body's trying to inform the mind as to where we can go to off gas or let go.

And what happens is, is because there's so much stuck energy, the unconscious feels like it's going to die if it touches it. There's no way out. Oh my God. If I feel the war, the grief, the despair, the lack of purpose, the mother wound, the father wound, you name it, like any kind of adhesion or any kind of bruise can be if they're stacked up high enough. So

incredibly painful and scary that the psyche cannot touch it because it fears that it may die. But the paradox is that it actually will die. The part of the psyche that is so attached and identified with those wounds and the outer exterior that carries those wounds and how one presents them in the world as being the tough guy with full tattoos. I'm not anti tattoos, by the way. But there is a spiritual meaning of that. That The only way out of all of this stuff.

is to actually feel what's going on and seek out the right kind of facilitation and mentorship. And even psychedelic therapy and breath work in many cases that becomes like a scalpel. You know, I I listen to the four agreements a lot, one of my favorite books. I have it on repeat all the time. And Miguel Reese said that the truth is like a scalpel. And when you cut, it's going to be painful in the beginning.

But that's where the poison can come out. And when the poison comes out, there can be a liberation and a freedom. and a a release of this domestication that we've all been entrained by that war is okay, pornography is okay, womanizing is okay, drug use and drinking, all these things have become a platitude. And normalized. Un completely normalized. Of of how it's okay for men to act, but yet

The paradox is as most men are just afraid of the scalpel. They're they're afraid of of the cutting and they're afraid of the poison coming out. And and that's why uh for myself, the the escape velocity that you had mentioned, which I think is a really good point.

My sense is that escape velocity can only happen when there's a foundation of honesty. Like you have to have honesty in order for velocity to happen. You wouldn't launch a rocket on sand. You'd need like a platform to launch a rocket to have velocity.

So the inner work and the relational work and the therapeutic work that's needed in order to have a foundation of honesty is how you start to achieve escape velocity. Now for me, escape velocity was only from Me sharing with my wife, then girlfriend.

Me seeking out real mentorship, real therapy. And quite frankly, I have no qualms about sharing this. Um, a man named Mike Zeller came into my life from a mutual friend, Mark Groves. So huge love and appreciation for Mark for this intro. And over the course of a year, he took us through three MDMA IFS guided therapeutic sessions.

And I'm sure you've talked about IFS on your show before, but internal family systems, there's essentially a a part of the psyche that's in exile that's being rejected, and there's a protector. And the protector is his or her job is to make sure that those feelings of fear of that exile never get felt. But what happens is that exile runs the show for our entire lives until they can finally take a breath and come out of the closet. So

So for me, it was having this deep realization in our final ceremony. And and honestly, it was an amalgamation of escape velocity to get to that point. But I had this moment where and if anybody's done an MDMA IFS ceremony, they know that you are going deep inside of your unconscious mind because what happens with MDMA Is that the hemispheres in the brain can relax and the typical neuropathways that are providing strength for the protector to protect the exile.

can put down their shields for a minute. And so the brain can actually relax. The default met mode network can turn down. And we can start to take in new information because with a facilitation, it's funny, we actually did it right here in the podcast studio. So it's pretty cool we're talking about this. He was able to ask me questions in in a facilitated way where for two hours I fought the medicine. I fucking fought it so hard. I did not want to see this part of myself.

And this part of myself was the part that was unconsciously projecting Forty-five years of mother wound and of mistrust of the feminine onto my wife. It was just so apparent to me. I can feel it right now on my body as I'm talking to you about it. And the amount of grief and shame that I felt in that moment was fucking overwhelming.

I'm actually still processing it as you can tell, right? The amount of grief and shame that when I knew I my behavior unconsciously had caused my wife pain was like unbearable. It was like unbearable at that time. And I got to this place where I could see the lines in her face that I had created. It was very profound. And it took me to this place of excitement because now I can clean up my side of the street.

I can be loving to her, I can provide containment for her, I can give her spaciousness to be a woman without projecting and putting her in a little box of what she should be like.

And I mean, porn's been in my life for a long time, but but it was just this so many recognitions, if you do a a true IFS MDMA ceremony of rapid healing that transpired after that. I was able to have another healing session with no MDMA, just breath work with a a man that I've had on my podcast named Daniel Raphael. And I had this full body exorcism where I was like sitting on my knees coughing grief out of my lungs, like physically coughing stuff out. It was

Kind of wild, y'all. It was super weird. But I had this visualization of like my father connected back to the seven generations. Literally the very thing that I'm about to bring to the world. Is the healing that I experienced for myself this year. And I saw, I could see it clear as a bell. My father, my grandfather, my great great, my great great great all the way back.

And I could see how every man was dealing with such immense amounts of stress and of pain and of anguish and of survival fucking survival that our men and our grandfathers have gone through. And how much reverence and respect they deserve for going through what they've gone through. Mm-hmm. And knowing that when they came back home or when they come to the family that they're literally doing the best they can. It's not just some intellectual thing. It's a true deep understanding in my heart of

Wow, every single man on both sides literally did the best they could with the level of development and consciousness they had. And what happened there was like this. Explosion in my heart, this explosion and release of resentment, this explosion and pouring in of forgiveness. Knowing that my father was raised by a Pentecostal religious man who didn't speak.

his grandfather had holes in his shoes and walked on the prairie and almost died. This epigenetic expression that the Native Americans call the seventh generation principle, I could see it, I could feel it, like it was in it was in me. And it and it the Native Americans say that uh when you heal something in your lineage. Through love, through forgiveness, that it not only ripples back seven generations, but you also heal seven generations forward.

And like, dude, the amount of pride and the amount of sacredness that I'm that I'm bringing to my work and that I'm living through my life. Knowing that my children will not have to pay for the sins of me or from seven generations back is so beautiful. It's the most beautiful gift I could ever give to my children.

To be able to say, I am the cycle breaker, not because I'm better than y'all, just because I know, just because I'm here. And thank you, God, for allowing me to be here and do this work and have this conversation in this quantum timeline that we're in.

So that my children don't have to suffer like I did. Isn't that every father's wish? Mm. That their children don't have to bear the burdens that they themselves have bear? That is the the ultimate wish of every father to live that kind of life for their sons, for their daughters, for their wives. And so all of that said, the healing of pornography came when the hooks were released as I was putting together this spaceship. I was putting together this ship that was getting me to even be honest.

in the IFS process because the work only works when you work it. And we can go to ceremony. There there's people that I know that have been through a hundred ayahuasca ceremonies. They're still an asshole. Right. They're still judgmental. They still hate their mother. They still hate their father. They're still holding on to the very resentment that drove them to the ceremony in the first place.

And so that's what it felt like. That's what it looked like to to go and and let go of porn and let go of judgment really, of self. And am I fully healed? Have I been fully cleansed of everything that I've been through? No. But at least I have the awareness.

And at least I'm here to break the cycle of that which I inherited, which is at the core of emotional epigenetics. It's the way that we bring in energy in our body from our lineage and it's the way that we give it the gift of goodbye so that our children don't have to suffer like we did. I saw this quote from Steven Jenkinson. I don't know if you've ever had him on your show. He's such a character. Um you worked in the death trade for a long time.

And uh, you know, it's uh sort of common uh it's becoming more commonplace knowledge that this generation will quote unquote do worse than previous generations. It's becoming harder and harder for the generations to do better economically. Right. So the the current generation is the projected that they won't be able to out earn us. You know, or or do better than us from an economic standpoint because it's so much harder. And he said, you know, maybe the goal isn't to

ensure that our children get more than us, but that they actually have less. And in doing so, we strip away some of the insanity that we're forcing into people's lives. And I do think that people are just over inundated. They're just inundated with information and data and sensory input and blah blah blah blah. And I I think that porn is a part I think that porn is a representation of that, right? It's like

Always accessible. It's always in your pocket. It's like ha you know, it's like an alcoholic just having a liquor cabinet in in their pocket at any given time. And I think for a lot of men You know, I can imagine myself hearing your story from the me, you know, ten years ago. Yeah. And be like, oh my gosh, am I gonna have to go like, do I have to go through all of that? Do I have to go do all like that sounds like I'm gonna get freaking rocked.

Would you want it any other way though? If the end result meant peace and I wouldn't, I wouldn't. If the end result meant peace and freedom, would you would you be scared of it? That's okay. It's okay to be scared of it. I think I think what I see with men that are struggling with pornography, though, is that There's like a I want a quick fix now. Yeah. I want a quick thing now. And I think the hard truth that you're talking about is that the porn is always indicative.

Pretty much always, of something that's very deep within their psyche. Is that r a fair assessment of what you're saying? That there's like the porn is a substitute for something that's missing in your life? And the porn is a representation of some very deep pain that you're carrying inside of you that you're gonna have to address. Every man can feel some compartment of truth in what I'm sharing now, and that is that it's not about the orgasm.

It's about the feeling you get of pseudo peace after the orgasm. Mm-hmm. That's what it's the reset button. Porn's the reset button, right? It's like I feel lonely, I feel angry, I feel pissed off that my girlfriend doesn't want to have sex with me. I'm whatever. Yeah. And it's like reset button, right? Watch porn. Climax. The times feel better. The times in my life where porn ran the show was when I was deeply afraid of actualizing my purpose.

So whenever I would be scared of doing a big podcast interview in the first five years, or whether I would be afraid of being something on camera that I wasn't off camera, that's when porn would creep in. And it goes back to, you know, your question of escape velocity. It's like the only way I'll say it again, man, the only way that pornography or really any addiction of any kind will not run the show.

is when there's a foundation of honesty with myself and with my woman and with my life, with God, with that which created me. That's a big piece why, you know, in twelve step, it's very aligned with the Christian faith. And I'm not here to knock twelve step. I think there is a part of twelve step that actually keeps people in that vibration personally. Um, because just because of the NLP, the language they use.

But when we really look at what Twelve Step is doing and why it's so successful, is because it connects people to a power and a creator that's outside themselves. Mm-hmm. And so that's actually a part of the answer to your question with pornography for men specifically is do you have a connection or do you have some kind of

relationship with that which created you. You can call it God, universe, spirit, whatever you want to call it. That place has to be there as well. And that's also a part that I neglected to mention until now is that Part of my healing with pornography came from letting go of my anger towards God. Letting go of the the fuck you God and the judgment of God and why is this happening to me, God?

And surrendering to the lessons that God brought forth. My creator brought forth these lessons of humility and forgiveness and acceptance. And on the other side of all of that is everything I've ever dreamed of. I mean, I'm living it right now.

I'm sitting here with you living my dream right now. So that that's a big piece of it, right? And and I think that you mentioned the reset button. Yes, it's a reset button, but you still have to play the video game when you turn it back on. You can reset the The Sega Genesis. Now I just like marked how old I am. You can reset. You can reset the video game. For a moment, he was

Yeah. But then the screen's still gonna come up. You're gonna have to press start and you're gonna have to live it again anyways. Yeah. So it's it's not necessarily being afraid of the game, it's becoming a more masterful game player. Yeah. That's how you beat pornography, which paradoxically it's not about winning or beating pornography.

That type of energy will actually propagate the much harder that you use it. Yeah. There's a there's a paradox there. But I I think it's it's having that escape velocity, but also bringing in a higher power that has to be there. If it's not there, then there's gonna be a feeling of apathy. Mm. And there's gonna be a feeling of well, why should I even care? Because there's no meaning to life. There's no point to life. So I'll just watch this porn and eat this food and

you know, go to the forty nineers football game and make my whole life about who's winning a sport and who's not. You know, all these crazy hooks that m modernity brings in. All of these go away because the the the crazy part, Connor, is like We don't have to fight any of this stuff. There's this whole movement um that says fight the new drug uh for porn. I took one of their online courses many years ago because I was like, Yeah, mentally I know that I'll beat porn this way.

Healing from porn is a spiritual and emotional process. It's a spiritual maturation of your relationship with God, trusting life and yourself and being honest with the person you love that you may or may not have children with. Like that's

That's how you heal pornography. That's how you let it go. It's like an entity in any ceremony. Entities only live in spaciousness of somebody who has space for them to live. Nobody gets entities in psychedelic ceremonies that doesn't have greater healing to do. So it's the same thing with porn. They're they're actually one and the same.

It's interesting'cause as I listen to what you're saying in terms of your journey in letting go of porn and how epigenetics has played into this, like in my in my frame. we use porn as a kind of pseudo attachment, you know, in the in the re in the place of actual relationship. We we put porn. Yeah. And when relationship is hard or we're not getting what we want from it or

Um, we don't know how to get our needs met. We move to this other kind of attachment, which is pornography. And I think in many ways I've started to say that like relationship is the antidote to addiction.

And that when we move out of addictive behaviors, it requires us to move into relationship more fully with primary attachments. And it sounds like for you Part of that attachment has been your relationship with your wife, huge in a huge way bringing more of yourself online and into the relationship with her and the the truth and the honesty of what you want, what you need, your part, taking ownership over it.

And then the other part was moving back into relationship with God. Mm-hmm. And You know I think I I say that because I know for some people It's a mixed bag when it comes to God. Sure. You know, and that's and it it is a big part of the AA process as well. And it's interesting because AA started as an offshoot because of actually because of Jung and one of his patients. And he was uh working with a client Who was an addict of the

and who was uh alcoholic and he said your your problem is not a psychological problem, your problem is a spiritual problem. Your problem is that you're missing God. And I think that was the brother of the guy that ended up starting A A And that's why it's such a huge proponent of it. So y you know, I say that because I think for everybody there there are different stages, there are different life choices.

And but I do want to just emphasize that piece of bringing yourself more fully into your relationships. So good. I I hope you don't mind. I just want to layer on top of what you just said one biological truth. Yeah. So there is Scientific research about the epigenome activation for methylation on FKBP five. And FK BP five is one's attunement to life stressors. So there's many research reports that have been done.

that show when someone goes through um trauma wiring or stuck energy wiring that on an epigenetic level, they're actually going to have a filter that looks through anything in their life that's not trusting, including God. Including God. So not only will they not trust mentorship or mens work, but they also won't trust life itself.

But it's actually a spiritual problem that's being expressed in biology. So this one methylation cofactor that is so profound, if y'all want to know this, there's a lot of research on this. It's so good. And I'm saying this because as a man, I like to know the science and the how once I know the science and the framework. Of like, oh, this is what's going on in me? Cool. Well, how can I shift it? How can I change it? So I I had to say that because I think most resistance to God

comes from this spiritual disconnection from God, but it creates a biological reality that's not in alignment with our true reality. Like I think our greatest freedom really comes when our biology is not in argument to our reality. That's the greatest freedom we could ever have. And if anyone thinks that's listening that you are not a son of God.

then that is your first place to discover the truth. You were like you were brought here, Connor, to to to not take your life and to be a father to your children and to do things for men that is so powerful and so sublime. that now you can feel it that there's no other way you'd ever want to live. But look what you had to go through in order for you to be here. And and me the same. I had to go through this ordeal, this insane ordeal that I don't wish on my children.

So the only way what I'm saying is the only way that we can make sense of any of this is to give it to God, to just trust that life has a plan and we don't have to even call it God. We can just call it life, universe, whatever you want to call it.

The reason it's in AA and the reason I'm bringing it up is because if that is not there, if there is not a substance or a felt sense That life is in control or God is in control or something greater or outside of you is in control, then if we're not careful and we disconnect too much from it. There can be no launching pad for any kind of velocity. There can be no desire to do men's work. There can be no really emotion at all besides potentially apathy or shame.

In my opinion. Yeah, I think I think most people don't have an issue with God per se. They have an issue with religion. Sure. And rightly so. And I I think that that's You know, religion is just a mi a mixed bag, right? I mean, when you look at the amount of good and harm that's come from religion and co-opting power. I mean, it's just it's very interesting. But I think we're gonna have to pause here.

Um, I'd love for you to just maybe leave folks with any final words of wisdom that you have for them, share a little bit about uh where you would like for them to go, anything that we didn't touch on. Great. Yeah, thank you, man. I really appreciate the space. So thank you for allowing me to emote on your podcast.

Um look, I I just want to say this one thing. For a long time I thought I was really broken. I actually believed it. Same. I'm broken, I'm not lovable, all these things. I'm here to tell you guys. You're not broken. You're just biologically burdened. That's it. The science of bioenergetics and emotional epigenetics is here for you. If if you gravitate towards it, head over to liberated life dot com. I have a free ten day course. It's one hundred percent free.

It's the opposite of what most marketers do, where they try to give a little thing. I just gave a thirty three video ten day course just because I want to share it with people. And that's it. Cool. And so I would head over to that and um Yeah, I just really appreciate the space to bring forth

my understanding of what it means to be a man, what it means to heal and how it impacts our generations forward and backward. So thank you, man. Awesome, buddy. Well thanks so much for joining me for everybody that's out there listening. Definitely man it forward as always. Man it forward share with somebody that you know is going to enjoy it.

Start a conversation, maybe share with your men's group, talk about er you know, whatever stuck out to you about our conversation today. And uh that's it. Thanks so much, Josh. Appreciate you, brother.