Connor Beaton
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, slowly psyoped or just directly told. Correct.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Well, where do we begin? I think the sort of like admitting that you have a problem is a good place to begin.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Okay, good. A couple good indicators. Number one, you have high levels of reactivity. So reactivity is just something happens in your external environment. There's a stimulus, right? Your partner says something to you, your boss says something to you, et cetera. And you react. You react from defensiveness or judgment or hostility, aggressiveness. You have very little tolerance.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So you have a pretty bad temper, right? And you react from that temper quite quickly. So that's a good indicator. Another one is that you are struggling or struggle quite often to just accomplish and do the things that you know you need to do. Emotions can really become a drag on us achieving or moving forward with the things that we want to do, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You mean Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin aren't the role models of emotional acuity?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So I think it was Jim Carrey said, like, depression is your body's way of saying, fuck you. And so that's another really good indicator that you're sort of tuned out from your emotions. You don't really know what you're feeling, but they are clawing for your attention. And how they're doing that is by preventing you from doing the things that you know you want to be doing.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So a lot of times with guys is if they're cut off from their emotions, they are highly over-indexed on their rational mind. And everything is through the lens of rationality and logic. And there's no sense of like, this is how I feel about this. If you ask like, well, how do you feel about your girlfriend or wife or partner? Do you think that you should get married?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
There's a lot of rational explanation that won't necessarily tell you at all how they feel. So there's a disconnection from everything.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
oftentimes a physical sense of what's happening inside of them so when you say what do you think about this and can you feel it anywhere in your body there's generally no sense of like yeah i feel anger here in my chest or i can feel sadness in my gut or i feel shame here it's like a nervous system decapitation correct yeah yeah it's a complete disconnection from the body um
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And another good one is what I call emotional constipation, where somebody really has a hard time expressing, experiencing, or even acknowledging that they are feeling something, whether that's because there's a threat to them or they've just been conditioned not to. So emotional constipation is another really big sign that somebody is pretty cut off from their emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
i'll give you einstein for a second then i'll answer your question directly he said the rational mind is a faithful servant and the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and we've created a culture that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift and so in psychology there's something called the the rider and the elephant and the rider is your rational mind and in the west in our in our culture we've largely over indexed that rider who's on top of the elephant and the elephant is your intuitive mind it's your emotional body it's your physical body
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
which has a tremendous amount of power, a tremendous amount of information. There's actually more information being sent from your body up into your brain than from your brain down into your body, which is the work of Bessel van der Kolk from The Body Keeps the Score. And so I think in some ways, we've been conditioned to really over-index that rational mind because there's safety in it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Their safety and not having to really understand what's happening in our body. And for a lot of men, what they feel internally is intense. When a guy feels anger, it feels intense. It feels like a threat. And he's been told not to be dangerous. He's been told not to be a threat. He's been told not to...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
you know not to scare people and not to raise his voice and you know be a good boy and comply and you know some of these things can really shut a man down from uh feeling his emotions don't cry etc so it's less of a thinking problem and it's more a a lack of modeling what it looks like to feel your feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
We've gone through generations of men where they just literally were not taught to feel their feelings, or they were actively taught to suppress what they were experiencing. And I don't know if it was on your show, another show where I talked about going through World War II, where all of these sayings came out of World War II, like man up, was to go get into the tank.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
right uh suck it up i don't know if this is 100 true or not there's like different accounts of it but suck it up meant when you were in the plane and you puked into your air mask you literally had to suck it back in and swallow it when you're fighting and so there's all of these adages where men have been put into horrendous situations that require them for survival purposes
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
to deploy disassociation, to literally disassociate from what they are feeling in their body. You know, if you're having to go and kill the enemy, you in some way have to disconnect from your emotional body and become hardened. It's just a rational thing. It's like either I kill them or they kill me.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so there's many, many different examples of social conditioning, environmental conditioning, just historical pieces that have led to us as men really having to shut down our emotions. But to get more directly to it on the individual level and maybe make this more practical for the individual... I think that for a lot of men, it feels like a threat.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's like there's a threat to their relationship if they open up and are emotional. There's a threat to their ability to perform if they open up and are relational. And there's just a lack, again, of being taught how to feel what's happening inside of them. And when that happens, you just go into your head. You just live in your thoughts and you're constantly just in the mode of perception, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So the way I like to look at this is that your senses are how you perceive reality and your emotions are how you experience reality. So there's your perception of your partner. There's your perception of the ice cream. There's the perception of how your burger smells. And then there's the experience, the direct experience
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
of that relationship, that experience that you're going through at the party with your friends or eating the hamburger at the burger joint. There's the experience of that, and that's where emotions really come into play.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And for a lot of men, we just sit in the seat of perception and explanation versus our direct experience, because sometimes our direct experience is highly intense or it's very challenging. It was very threatening, and we've not really been taught what to do with that.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Okay. First place, 100% is awareness. So you need to start to develop body-oriented awareness. I call it your DFE, your direct felt experience. So with every single emotion, you can think of every single emotion as a specific charge, like an electrical charge. And every charge has a very specific experience somatically or physiologically in your body.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So for example, if you get angry, you might have some heat start to build up in your chest or you can feel your hands start to get a little agitated. Maybe your feet start to tap, right? Some people like bob their feet up and down. Your face might start to get flushed. Your breathing might start to get tense, right? But every emotional charge has a very specific somatic or physiological response.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Shame, grief, sadness, et cetera. So if you're wanting to develop emotional mastery, where you need to begin is just asking yourself the question, what somatic experience or what physical experience accompanies each emotion? And as men, this might start with just having some awareness of saying, I feel angry right now. Or I feel sad right now. Or I feel happy right now.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And just beginning to have some awareness that you are feeling what you're feeling. Because again, depending on how nervous system decapitated you are, I like that expression, or how emotionally constipated you are, how backed up you are, Just developing that first awareness of being able to acknowledge, ah, I am feeling something is a really, really important step for the majority of men.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So we need to start there. Do you want to add anything in or ask anything before we keep going? You're on a roll. Let's keep rolling. So once you've developed that awareness, then you need to be able to learn what to do with each emotion. And every emotion is a little bit different. I think one of the main emotions that men contend with often is anger.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And for men, anger is usually the emotion that we deploy. It's the emotion that we reject the hardest because maybe we've been told, don't feel that, don't experience that. And so what you want to start to do is to use your breath because your breath is the modulation dial of your nervous system, of your autonomic nervous system specifically.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And your emotions are largely being produced in your autonomic nervous system between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. You're oscillating back and forth between those two. And it's sending data and information up into the brain to your hypothalamus and amygdala. And they're determining threat response and all those types of things.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But what you want to start to do is to bring awareness into your body by using the breath. And so getting more and more attention on your inhales, on your exhales, and beginning to locate where do I actually experience that emotion in the body. And being able to really detail it. So when you feel anger... what does anger feel like in your body, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So for me, I kind of feel like the Ironman power core in my chest, like light up. And then the angrier that I get, the more it just starts to pulse out through my chest, into my arms, down into my legs. And if it reaches up into my head, then I know I'm screwed. That's when it's just like, there's definitely a cause for a pause there because your emotions can hijack your brain, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Your emotions can hijack your communication and how you're interacting. So begin to vary as much as you can with as much detail as you can. Describe the physical experience of your emotions. Describe what it's like when you feel anger. Describe what it's like when you feel sadness or grief or joy or frustration, whatever it is. Really begin to describe what happens.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Does your breath start to slow? Does it become constricted in your throat? Do you start to feel like you're closing down in your chest and you're collapsing? Do you feel like you want to run? What actually accompanies that emotion? And then once you have that emotional awareness, you can move into beginning to understand if or what that emotion is trying to tell you.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So every emotion, again, can have some important data and information that it's trying to relay, right? Maybe a boundary has been crossed in your relationship. And this is what happens all the time. So I'll give a good example that maybe is going to help guys. Anger is necessary for setting boundaries, just as an example.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So if you're disconnected from your anger and you think that your anger is a problem, very likely you have piss poor boundaries. You get walked all over. You do not have any real sense of no or I'm not okay with this because your anger is an alarm system sometimes that a boundary has been crossed. So being able to identify, oh, I feel heat in my chest. I feel heat in my face.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I can feel like I'm angry. Then we can create a little bit of space from the anger. So it's not I am angry because that's usually where we're acting and responding from that place. But we create a little bit of a pause. From awareness of the emotion, the sense of the emotion, a little bit of space, and then is there something that we want to communicate or express?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Not from that emotion, but maybe that something was crossed or somebody overstepped a boundary or that you felt embarrassed about something or whatever it is that the emotion is trying to alert you to. So that's a good sort of breakdown of what you can begin to do with your emotions. There's more that we can get into for all those, but that's a kind of a good like four step what you do.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But the key to it is building awareness. And then the last step that I'll give you is to build some tolerance. So for a lot of men, there's a very low tolerance of threshold. And so grief starts to come up or sadness starts to come up and there's zero room for it. And so they shut it down immediately and anger starts to come up and they have zero resilience to it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so they just explode externally. And so part of what we need to do is we need to actually sit with our emotions. We not wallowing in them, not feeling sorry for ourselves, but we actually need to give ourselves time to feel into what it's like in our body. Because for a lot of guys, it's like, I don't like how I'm feeling. And so I want to get away from this as quickly as humanly possible.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I don't like my anger. I don't like this sadness. I don't like this grief. I don't like this frustration. I want to shut it down as quickly as humanly possible. Men, I'll give another example with anger. Men that struggle with anger, one of the best things that they can begin to do is to sit in the anger when it arises.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So I give guys that have, they're not like rage issues, but anger problems, low temper. What we'll start to do is, okay, when you feel angry, And you feel that anger at like a two. Because again, every emotion has a charge. And then it also has an intensity. So a good way that I like to think about this is label the charge and label the intensity. Okay, I'm feeling the charge of anger.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
How intense is it? It's a two.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
okay i'm feeling the charge of anger it's a it's an eight okay well if it's above a seven it's probably cause for a pause because that means that your prefrontal cortex your your cognitive functions are starting to become impaired and you are likely not going to respond properly so that would be a good cause for a pause and then you go sit and with anger specifically i call it the fire meditation you sit in that anger
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
you just breathe and you just notice what's happening in your body because for a lot of guys anger hasn't really been a safe thing maybe you grew up around a parent who was angry and abusive or violent or hostile and so anger feels like a visceral threat in your body so you have to begin to condition your body to have a a higher tolerance for feeling some of these emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And what that will do is it will slowly over time train your brain to know I can be angry and that can be safe, or I can feel grief and that can be okay, whatever the emotion is. So charge and intensity, and then sitting with the emotion to actually build some level of tolerance around it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah. So number one, develop awareness, have some awareness around the charge that's in your body. And that charge is just your whatever the emotion is, right? Whatever, whether it's anger or grief or sadness, etc., Number two, after you have the basic awareness is label the experience of the emotion of the charge in your body.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So I feel the charge of anger in my chest and label the intensity of it. So I feel the charge of anger in my chest and it's a five, right? Step number three is try and describe it as much as humanly possible. Grab a journal, grab the notes app on your phone, whatever works for you, and just try and write it out as much as humanly possible.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Then number four is try and identify what the emotion is wanting to express. A good prompt for that is, if my anger had a voice, what it would say is, or if my sadness had a voice, what it would say is. and give that emotion some level of expression. That doesn't mean, just very important caveat, that you are going to launch whatever the anger says out at somebody else.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It means that you're going to write that down, you're gonna reflect on it, and you're going to, and this is what a lot of therapists say, process what is maybe relevant or important about what that emotion is saying. Most people just throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to emotions. It's like, well, my emotion is saying this.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so I'm either going to vomit it all over somebody, which is not emotional intelligence, or I'm going to ignore it entirely. That's not emotional intelligence. We want to feel it. We want to be able to identify it. We want to feel it in our body. We want to be able to sit with it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And then we want to be able to parse through if there's relevant information and data that our emotions are actually bringing up to us.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So for men, where they get stuck is... usually in the permission stage. It's actually giving themselves permission to feel their feelings, because there's a whole slew of what ifs that usually come along for them. And just giving themselves permission to say, okay, I don't know how I feel most of the time, or I am emotionally constipated, I am disconnected from my emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Because for a lot of guys, what they say is, yeah, well, so what? Like, I don't feel my feelings, what's the big deal?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
it's like well if you don't feel your feelings then no one else around you can feel you they can't interact with you relationally they they don't know whether you're really happy or sad and most of the time what people get from men when they're around them is you're angry or you're just not there so the permission stage is a big place where guys get angry the second stage is the tolerance stage
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, I mean, I think a good way to put it is men are not incentivized to open up emotionally for a number of different reasons, right? I think oftentimes, I mean, I get comments on my YouTube videos all the time, stories from men who Did open up to a past partner, to a girlfriend, to a wife, and were left shortly thereafter.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
it can be really challenging for you to build up any level of tolerance, especially because the majority of men are carrying around an intensity inside of them that is very hard for them to manage. So some men, the intensity that they're feeling is way too much energy. And we label that as
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
anxiety in today's culture so for some men they're carrying around so much energy in their body whether it's because of trauma or it's because of life circumstances or it's just their natural state they just naturally have a tremendous amount of energy internally that they don't know how to deal with that energy for other men it's a lot of anger for other men they have a lot of grief and sadness
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And when they really start to try and build tolerance around it, their natural mechanism of I don't want to fucking deal with this. So let me just have another drink, you know, open up the web browser and watch porn and jerk off and get rid of this feeling is so intense. And that's what most of us have been conditioned to do.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Most men have been conditioned to deal with their emotions by drinking off and watching porn, smoking weed, drinking alcohol. All of those things are wonderful for hitting the reset button or numbing out what you're feeling. So developing tolerance is a really, really big challenge for a lot of men because when you start, you feel like you suck.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
There's just no, it's like, I took my son skiing for the very first time and he's never been on skis. So he sucks. I mean, he did pretty good, all things considering. He's probably about as good as me on skis, I fear. I mean, he's three and a half, so he's figuring it out. But you're starting at a place of lacking competence. And we as men hate lacking competence. We hate lacking competence.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so you have to be willing to be in a place for a little while where you are almost frustrated with the process because if you're somebody that is dealing with anger and you're angry and you keep losing your temper at your girlfriend or your wife or whatever...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
and you're trying to develop some tolerance for it so that you have a higher threshold of not losing your temper, it can be very frustrating at first because for a while, you're going to sit with your anger and you sit down, you're angry, you set a timer for two, three, four, five minutes, just something manageable at the beginning, and you're going to feel...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I think that there's been a few generations of men that have been told not to feel that their best emotional tool is suppression, is repression, is just like stuff it down, pour some whiskey over top, light some weed up and just keep soldiering on, stiff upper lip as I think they say in your country.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Well, probably at first you're going to curse me for giving you this exercise, which is what inevitably happens. But then you're going to feel like it's impossible because for the majority of men, that intense emotion that they're carrying around inside of them has overpowered them constantly throughout their life.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Their depression, their anxiety, their anger, their rage, their embarrassment, their shame. It's dominated them to some degree. And what you're really trying to do is sit with the enemy. For most men, their intense emotion that they're carrying, they've perceived it as the enemy. It's the thing that they do battle with, again, whether it's depression, anxiety, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so there's this inner civil war that's constantly happening with that anxiousness that they're like, fuck you. I hate you. I don't want to feel you. Or God, this anger is ruining my fucking life. It's ruined my marriage. It ruined my career. I hate this part of me. But by sitting with it, you over time are starting to build a relationship of acceptance, of acknowledgement, of understanding.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You can even start to sit with like, well, where did this emotion, where did the intensity of this emotion come in the first place? So that inflection point of starting to try and build tolerance is really hard for a lot of men. For me, as an example, I'll just use myself. I have a tremendous amount of energy, like Energizer Bunny level energy.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so beginning this process was really hard because I had a lot of anger and I had a lot of intensity and just a boatload of energy. And so sitting down with my anger when it would pop up, And it would come up and it would usually show up in, you know, my intimate relationship or close friendships.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Guys being ridiculed, whether it's in the locker room from another man or being ridiculed by a woman who then loses attraction or says that she doesn't like the way that he brought it forward. So men just aren't generally incentivized to be emotionally expressive. Men are rewarded for being emotionally intelligent in the sense that they hold their shit together, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It was really hard at first because that's where, you know, my inner critic would start to spin up and I'd be shit talking myself and this is ridiculous and I want to do this.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But that's really the place where you start to reconcile with this intensity that's living inside of you that's oftentimes keeping you away from the people that you love, creating distance from the goals that you want to achieve, etc. So those are the places where guys really get hung up.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Energetically, things like anger and anxiety and panic and fear, they're often very externally pushing, where things like grief and sadness and depression, it's like an anvil on the chest.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, one's more implosive, one's more explosive. I like this quote that says that grief is praise. Grief is praise because it is the natural way that love honors what it misses. That's Martin Prechtel. I like this notion because for many of us, for many guys, and I won't speak for guys because we hate that.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But for many guys, we've been taught you're weaker for grieving, you're weaker for being sad, you're weaker if you deal with depression. And that compounds it. The hiding of your depression and your grief will compound your grief and your depression.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
for sure it's the surest way to have more grief and more depression so what we need to do is start to express right so for the explosive emotions we need to begin to slow we need to begin to slow our breath we need to begin to sit with them we need to be able to understand that we can trust ourselves when that really intense emotion starts to come up
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And sometimes that means that you are labeling it, right? So with every man that I ever work with, I say you have to determine what a cause for a pause is for you if you're dealing with those explosive emotions. And that cause for a pause might be that you have a physical response or that you say something in your relationship and then you say, you know what, this is cause for pause.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I need to pause because I'm getting so whatever you want to say, angry or dysregulated or unable to communicate. With the heavier emotions, it's the inverse. Those heavier emotions almost want to cause you to be inebriated. They want to slow down your movement to such a degree where it feels like you can't do anything. And with grief specifically, I'm going to speak to grief first.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, oh man. I mean, there's so much that you can grieve. I like to say that we walk through life with grief and gratitude hand in hand all the time. I mean, grief can be about not just the loss of a person or the death, it can be a transition.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You might be transitioning in a career, you may have gotten a promotion and you're not working with the same people anymore and you're grieving the loss of the team that you were working with. I mean, Grief really is tied to transition. So any type of transition that you experience, there's likely going to be a grief that comes along with it. And it can even be, I mean, I'll give you an example.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
This might sound strange, but I reached a point in my life five, six years ago where, this is before my son was born, where I was married to this wonderful woman. My career was going really well. And I had this very unique type of grief, which was, holy shit, I made it. holy shit, I didn't die. I didn't kill myself.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
That you're able to weather through really intense emotional situations. It's emotional mastery. Correct. But the way that most men get there is maybe not the best for their mental and physical well-being.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I didn't get dragged underneath the weeds of alcoholism or drug addiction or some of the heavy shit that I was dealing with. I reached escape velocity. I reached escape velocity. And there was a really unique type of, it wasn't elation. It wasn't happiness. It was a type of grief that I had been carrying in me of like, holy crap, I didn't know if I would actually reach this point. Fascinating.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And I think that people experience that a lot. And so grief isn't just about loss. Sometimes grief is about achievement. I've worked with NFL athletes and NHL players and rappers, heavy metal artists, and sometimes their greatest grief comes when they win the award, when they win the Stanley Cup or the – I'm like blanking on the NFL one. Clearly I'm Canadian, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I'm like, all hockey references. But sometimes the grief comes in those moments where you achieve the thing and the effort that you've been carrying around and everything comes out. So grief is a very specific one where it needs expression and it needs witness. There's almost no way around it. I like to say that grief that's not witnessed is not processed.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So if you have grief of a former relationship, a marriage that's ended, a relationship that's ended, and you will not let anybody see that grief, you cannot fully process the ending of the relationship. And this is why people stay in this space. Why can't I let them go? How come I can't move on from the relationship? Well, you haven't actually let anybody see you grieve.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And we've, in our culture, made it very strange to deal with grief because, I mean, we have all these sayings now, right? It's like, you know, his friend got diagnosed with cancer and he gave me the ick. You know, he was crying about his friend getting diagnosed. I saw this meme the other day. It was exactly this. And so I think we have this social stigma around people grieving.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And we want it to be over quite quickly. And so usually for people, they hide their grief instead of express it and expose it. And it needs that.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yes. Yeah. Whether that's with, you could do it with a therapist or a psychologist or a coach, counselor, but ideally you're doing it with people who love you and who know you and who can witness you through that. Again, it's this notion that grief is the natural way that we honor what love misses. And that's a very important part of human nature.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Oftentimes, what we end up doing is we defer grief. We try and push it down the road, and it turns into a slow depression. So grief needs to be witnessed, and it needs to be expressed. You need to be able to say, I'm grieving the loss of X, Y, and Z, or I'm grieving the movement in the space of my life. I'm grieving the transition into this place.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And to have somebody that can witness it and actually reflect back like, yeah, I get that. That's terrible. And so having people in our lives that can do that is important. I think with things like depression, expression is important. Being witnessed is important. But there's also a kind of... pressing out that's required.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Like you actually have to begin to move outside of the confines because depression is this thing that kind of closes in on your heart, on your mind, on your emotions, on your thinking. And it really becomes the, this like weighted blanket that you can't get out from underneath of. And so sometimes you need the expression of I'm feeling this way. You need to be witnessed.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But you also need people who maybe are going to say, let me help you up. So sometimes part of depression is saying, I actually need help. I need you to help me get out of this funk because I don't know what to do. You know, it's like being caught in quicksand. It's like you probably need somebody to help get you out of the quicksand. That's really what depression is emotionally.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So part of depression is asking for help, asking for support without falling into the trap of obfuscating the responsibility to the other person. Because oftentimes what happens with depression is this victim mindset sets in of I'm worthless. I can't do anything. I'm not able to get out of this. And then there's this, I need a savior to come and get me out of it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So we can ask for help without actually, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
causing somebody else to do that to pull us out and I think with something like depression there's just no way around it working out like go to the gym go to the gym and work out and work out ruthlessly you know at first it might feel like just getting your ass to the gym once or twice a week is like everything that you can do but with something like depression that's really going to help you
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Doing breathwork is very, very helpful for things like grief and depression and sadness. A lot of the times our emotions, we have all of these psychological barriers to getting into our emotions. And sometimes things like breathwork and psychedelics can shut down what's called the default mode network, which is our thinking mind. And it can access our deeper feeling body much quicker.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So you can do breath work to, you know, like the intense Wim Hof or holotropic breathing, those types of breath works. If you do them long enough can really help you to access a lot of that emotion and get it out.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Well, that's the, your body keeps the score, but I mean, that's why I say that emotions are the language of the body, right? Is that they're trying to express something. They're trying to speak something. And sometimes it's from a time in your life, it's nonverbal.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You might be going through something that has no memory attached to it from when you were one or two or three, or you're expressing grief that you never dealt with or processed from a breakup or that you never worked through properly. And you go into breathwork and all of a sudden, like you said, it bubbles up and goes. So
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Those are some helpful ways to move through things like grief, sadness, and depression. We could get more granular with them, but those are some high-level ways.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
What an analogy. So yes, that, that is what I'm saying for better or for worse. That is what I'm saying. And I'm very clear when men come into work with me, cause I seem to attract a lot of like finance guys that are hyper linear. They're very good at what they do. Hedge fund owners, you know, guys that are wall street traders, you know, And they've lived in their brain for a very, very long time.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And they inevitably say, but I don't want anything to suffer. I don't want to slide back in any way, shape, or form. It's like, well, then you are going to no matter what. The consequence of not feeling your feelings is that you will inevitably sabotage in one way or another. So either you take the reins...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And you actively move into a position of potency by saying, I'm going to try and address this. Or those emotions will inevitably be a downfall for you in some way, shape, or form. They just can't.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Well, you mean emotions stop you from having power?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, well, and who knows how you might perform, how you might increase profits afterwards living more fully.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Correct. Well, this is, I think what you're talking about is there is an intersection between feeling your feelings and finding a purpose.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
you unequivocally cannot find a deep sense of purpose i mean maybe not unequivocally there are very very very very very few cases that i have ever come across of men that have found deep meaning and purpose purpose and fulfillment in life who are shut off from their emotions it requires you to go through the territory of the unknown which is your emotions
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
They're the things that are the battlefield that you're really, if you're honest with yourself, most men are afraid to go into. And that loss of power that you're talking about, are you familiar with Richard Rohr? He's a Franciscan, I think he's a Franciscan monk. It's quite old now, but he has this great saying where until a man experiences a journey of powerlessness, he will always abuse power.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And the real essence of what initiation used to be, boys used to go through initiation processes that put them into the realm of being a man. And part of that initiation was you were powerless. You got thrust out into some experience where you literally could not dominate it. You couldn't conquer it. You couldn't overcome it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You had to experience what it was like to move and be in relationship with something that was bigger than you, that could conquer you, that you are somewhat powerless against. And that's really what I've been talking about in terms of developing that tolerance with your emotion, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
If you are a man who has this really deep darkness inside of you that's heavy, that feels like it's overwhelming you constantly, it's like, well, that's a type of an initiatory experience. You are up against something that you feel powerless against. Same with your anger, same with your anxiety, same with whatever it is, right?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I mean, fill in the blank with whatever emotion feels like it's too much for you to handle. Yeah. And so the formula isn't to just ignore any of your emotions. You will not find a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in that. The formula is to move into and actively choose that state of powerlessness.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And for a period of time, not forever, not to wallow in it, not to be like, I'm a helpless, useless human being. But if you look at any of the great myths out there, like the Odyssey or the Iliad, they go on a journey of powerlessness. That's what it's all about.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's about you venturing out into the unknown, being put in powerless position after powerless position and learning something extremely useful about yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so as men, part of how we develop a deeper sense of maturity and mastery in life is that we begin to put ourselves in positions where we feel those feelings and those emotions inside of us that feel overwhelming, that feel like they're going to collapse our life. And I see this all the time in guys where it's just like, I've been holding this grief or this anxiety at bay for years.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And I feel like it's about to blow absolutely everything up. And I'm afraid to let myself feel it. And that's the space that you have to enter into. Because in that is, again, it's all the data and the information. I mean, you read somebody like Marcus Aurelius, what he's really talking about is he is one of the most emotionally...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
adept writers that i've ever come across he's just talking about his direct experience of reality of existence of ruling a kingdom of going to war of loving of women like he's talking from a very emotionally experiential place But it's very processed in a way where you can tell that there's a maturity there, that he's been working on his emotions for a very, very long time.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's not that he's completely disconnected from them. It's that he's built such a deep relationship to his emotions and to his experience that He's able to articulate life in a way that draws all of us towards it. So yes, you will likely feel a loss of power. No, that's not sexy. But you will likely learn, you will learn something about yourself that you know is missing right now.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
That's been my experience, that the thing that you think is missing in your life, whether it's in your marriage, your relationship, your sex life, your finances, your sense of purpose, it's in this place of going into our emotions and feeling cumbersome and like a beginner and sort of fumbling around at first for... Okay, I'm going to let myself express rather than explain.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Maybe we should talk about that difference. But I'm going to let myself feel my feelings and see what happens and be honest about what I'm experiencing. You know, Jordan Peterson says, tell the truth and it'll take you on an adventure. Well, part of your truth is that you are feeling something. And being honest about what you're feeling is brutal sometimes. It is fucking brutal.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But man, does it take you on an adventure. And man, can it lead you to a deep sense of purpose and meaning and love and connection in life that far surpasses anything that your rational mind can conjure up. Anything.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah. So when we live this, okay, most men, we live in, we live in explaining. This is where the term mansplaining comes from, right? We love to explain things.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So there's the hashtag that's going to come out of this, manspressing. We're going to popularize that. But we love to explain. We love to explain how things work. Again, it's the over-indexing on the rational mind. And it creates a ton of challenges in our relationship because what women are really asking for is express love.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
what you want, express what you're experiencing, express what you desire. And we try explaining it to them. And it's like speaking two different languages. So to explain something is to say, this is how it works. This is why I think it's a good idea. This is how it's going to unfold. It's really the how, it's really the what, what things look like, what things sound like, et cetera.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Expressing something is more about, again, your DFE, your direct felt experience. When you went through that, when you had that conflict or that argument with your girlfriend, express what you experienced. Were you disappointed? Did you feel frustrated with how the conversation went because you've had this conversation time and time again?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
What were you actually experiencing from your first person subjective experience? What happened inside of you? And the more that you can express, the more that you're tuning into that other data set that is equally as important as the what and how things are going to unfold.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Correct. You're always in the position when you're trying to explain everything and you're just in your rational mind, you're one step away from the actual experience of your reality. So that means you're one step away from the experience of the love and the joy
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
and the frustration and the anger and the whole the whole thing and so this is why for a lot of men there it's a very safe place to be you can operate from that place but i think for a lot of guys this is where the disconnect from their life comes right it's like i i don't like my life i feel like something's missing i feel like some you know feel miserable or you know there's just something not quite right i have the passionate i'm not fulfilled
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I'm not passionate. I'm not fulfilled. I don't have those things. It's like, well, because you're not actually letting yourself experience life because experiencing life can be challenging. I was going to tell a story about you, but I won't do that. I was going to talk about our dinner. Here, I'll couch it this way, if that's okay. And you can always cut this out. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I remember having dinner with you at a point in time where you were in a rough state. And I really appreciated how much you were grappling with this exact question. I could see you explaining what happened. I could see you explaining what was going on and why the decision was that it was. And I could feel from you, I could experience from you the undercurrent of how hard it was for you.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And that all of that, you were letting that slowly come to the surface. And when people let themselves experience and feel, we are able to connect to them more deeply. I really felt much more close to you in that moment, closer than I had ever felt to you before. Because all of you was there. It wasn't a concept.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I could actually feel like, oh, there's what Chris is experiencing about this moment in time in his life. And it really has an effect on him.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah. So ask yourself if you're explaining or expressing. Start there. Start with that as number one. Am I explaining? what happened or what I think is going on? Or am I expressing what I'm actually experiencing? Am I expressing what I'm actually feeling about the divorce, about the shit at work, about the stuff that's happening with the kids? Am I actually expressing what's going on?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So just start to notice the difference because when you're explaining something, there's no emotional connection. There's almost none. There's no feeling sense in your body. When you're expressing something, how I feel it, how most people describe it, is that you actually feel as though you are communicating with your body involved in some way, shape, or form.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You can actually feel your body as you're communicating. You can feel joy or a little bit of nervousness or whatever it is that you're experiencing as you're expressing. So just begin to ask yourself because what you wanna do is you wanna catch the pattern of falling back in to just explaining your way into oblivion.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So that's number one is ask yourself, am I explaining or expressing and move towards expression? Correct. Number two is create as much time as you can, ideally 30 to 60 minutes a day of untasked cognitive time. This might be unstructured cognitive time. It might be stream of consciousness journaling where you just write out whatever is happening inside of you. This is such an incredible exercise.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I give it to all my clients. It doesn't matter how much money they have, how successful they are. I give it to every single client or how not successful they are, etc., You can go for a walk for 30 to 60 minutes with no music, no audio book. We clutter ourselves so heavily. Most of the men that I work with have very little unstructured cognitive time.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so at the very end of the day, they're laying in bed, scrolling through social media, trying to drown out the emotional information and data that's rising up to their mind. Right. Instead of replaying that embarrassing conversation where you approach that girl and she was like, no, I'm not going to give you my phone number.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You try and drown it out by doom scrolling through whatever your social media platform is. So have 30 to 60 minutes of unstructured cognitive time. stream of consciousness journaling, going for a walk, lay in bed for 30 to 60 minutes, give yourself an extra 30 minutes, go in bed, assume that it's going to take 30 to 60 minutes, and maybe just write down some of the things that you're experiencing.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
The last thing I would say is involve people in your life. If you're in a relationship, one of the best ways, and even if you're not, you can get your buddies on board with this, is to have other people point out when you've moved into explaining versus expression.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Now, this isn't to say that explaining isn't sort of put this caveat in there doesn't mean that explaining isn't relevant or important for your life. There are some things that you absolutely need to explain at work and in board meetings. So make sure that you're not diminishing it entirely. But have other people who are going to support you.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Like, you know, I asked you how you were doing today and you started to explain to me what happened. You know, how are you actually feeling about that? So have other people that are in your corner. They're going to help you move towards that expression and communicating emotionally versus staying stuck in this rigid space. I found that to be really helpful, especially with army guys.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I've worked with a lot of like former Navy SEALs and military. And sometimes that accountability can be very, very helpful because Especially for guys that they're trying to break a mold that they have been conditioned to move against. Because if you're in the military, you're really meant to shut off.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Some of it. Some of it you can do by yourself. I really am a strong advocate for whether it's a men's group or a community of men that are doing some type of work like this because you... you can rapidly, I mean, it's like the trading bros on Reddit, right? It's like, I don't know if you've ever been into like the trading forums on Reddit. Have you ever gone down that rabbit hole?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Does Wall Street bets count? Yes, sure. Yeah, why not? But like, that's a community of men that have a mission. And they can, you know, you can go sideways sometimes, but they can really support one another. And so if you find a community of guys that are supporting one another in this endeavor, it's going to help you exponentially when it comes to this.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Because you're going to have other guys that are speaking this language, that are supporting you with this, that are... you know, that are witnessing you in the challenge and the process that you're going through. So I think for a lot of guys, they'll benefit from being in some type of community or group because our tendency is to do it solo, right? We want to lone wolf all of this.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And what I found is that most men, they try and like, I'm going to take myself away from society and away from relationship. I'm going to go work on myself. I'm going to go into monk mode forever. 12 months. And I'm going to come back this perfect, pristine human being when that's not the case. You know, you need interaction with other people.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And the point of doing this work oftentimes with other men is to work through some of the volatility that can come up. It's like you're going to get into a men's group and inevitably one of the guys is going to piss you off. right? I mean, you're going to get frustrated. He's like, he's talking about the same shit, you know, every single week, he's complaining about the same stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And the point of it is to voice and to express, I don't like this about you, right? Or to confront that part of you that would normally just keep quiet and sit back or would check out and tune out. So a big part of it is about doing that work amongst other men. I mean, you could go down the iron sharpens iron path, but it's just too cliche for me.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Having emotions doesn't make you less of a man. Feeling your feelings doesn't make you less of a man. Being able to feel your feelings and articulate them properly actually makes you more of a man. And that's the standard now. That's the gold standard. And I would say it always has been. If you look at the Stoics, they were just men who learned to...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
be logical, to be hyperlogical, but to also express emotionally. Most of them were poets and playwrights and musicians, and they figured out how to express. And so if you want to find a deeper sense of purpose, I'm really trying to make a case for it because I get messages from men every day. I sent you one the other day.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
who feel broken, who feel like they can't articulate what they're feeling, who are on the verge of taking their own lives, who have suppressed their own emotions from the people in their life for years and are in really bad places. And my mission is to really support men like that. And you don't have to be in a bad place to start to feel your feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
You don't have to be fucked up or broken to start feeling your feelings. unequivocally be better off for doing so. But man, I just wish that... Yeah, I mean, I just wish that this was more normal because I get emails and messages every day from men who have cut themselves off from their emotions and find themselves right at the brink. And yeah, it's heartbreaking because I see so many men.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I can't not look in men's eyes and not see their pain. And so I just wish that more men would share what's actually going on with them so they didn't feel so bloody alone in the world. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah, I think that summary is really good. And I'll just reaffirm something that I said, I think, when we talked about attachment last time I was on, which is that, and this is my good friend, Dewey Freeman, who's been a therapist for 40 plus years. He's got a saying that the foundation of attachment is going through a hard time and coming out the other side okay.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so I think we've gone through a few generations of men who used avoidance as their main tool with emotions and because of that cut themselves off from some pretty important data and information. And so a lot of men have just, you know, older generations haven't been able to speak the language of emotions, of what they're feeling, of what they're going through.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I've got the biggest emotional dicks on the planet.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So the foundation of relationship is being able to go through a hard time and come out the other side okay. And the truth about monogamy is that when you're in a relationship with somebody, you are inevitably going to go through some type of hardship that, whether it's you individually or you as a couple, that really tests who you are, who the relationship is, how your partner shows up.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Yeah. Yeah, I saw this. I just did a commentary on it. I saw this reel of this woman. There's like three or four women on the podcast, and they were talking about how the one woman started off and she said, when a man treats me well, I actually feel uncomfortable and I don't like it. And the other women all agreed with her.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And I was like, what a fucking wild way to say that you like dysfunctional relationships. Why don't you just say, I like dysfunctional men and dysfunctional relationships. Just say that.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Oh, man. I mean, I think that generally we feel emotions pretty intensely. And so when our emotions let loose, sometimes it cannot be pretty. It can be loud. It can be big. It can be intense. And so I think sometimes men have a bad rap because of that.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
That's a good way of putting it. That's a good way of putting it, man. I mean, I think the last thing I was going to say around dealing with emotions, I love that notion of finding out early on whether somebody's on the same page as you emotionally and having those sort of emotional tests. Are you okay with, can we go through a hard time and come out the other side okay?
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Or do you completely fall apart or are you not interested in the same things as me? But I think for the guys that are out there and they're not 100% sure where to begin, And you just want one thing to take away from all this. It's just start by acknowledging what you are avoiding emotionally. Just start there. Just start by acknowledging with somebody in your life, like, I'm avoiding...
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
how angry I am. I'm avoiding how depressed I actually am. I haven't been honest about how much anxiety I actually have or that I'm fucking scared all the time. Just start with what you've been repressing. And sometimes that can be such a powerful first step. I mean, Jung said that
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
um confession is the first step of any therapeutic process and just that admission can be enough to put you on a path of expression and tuning into your emotions on a much deeper level and and just practicing that just having that become routine of like I haven't been honest about this part of how I've been feeling. I haven't been honest about that part of how I'm feeling.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And how you go through that hardship, whether it's emotional or physical or whatever, is going to determine the quality of the relationship and likely the longevity of the relationship. And I think the other thing I'll just say is people really underestimate how much they're going to change in the span of 5, 10, 15 years.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And just being truthful about what you've been experiencing internally with somebody that you trust, with somebody that is on board with that, setting that up properly is important, not just dumping it on them ad hoc and hoping that it goes well. Being like, that Connor guy gave me bad advice. Setting it up properly and making sure that they're on board for this process. But
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Once you go down that path, it can lead you into developing much better friendships, much more transparent friendships like we're talking about, and a much deeper relationship where I think the greatest demand within any human being is to be fully known. I think that there's something in us that is magnetically pulling us towards being known.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And to set up relationships where we can be fully known in a way that is healthy and not
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
you know not about attention seeking or grandiose validation or wallowing in your own misery wallowing in your own misery you know it's not about any of that but it's about actually being authentically and genuinely known by somebody else who cares about you like what's the alternative like where else are you going to find that level of intimacy really you know you can have a twin brother or sister
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
Just go to Mantox.com. You can check out my book there. We have a men's community. You can check it all out there. So Mantox.com or on YouTube or on Instagram. It's just Mantox.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And one of the challenges that comes along with long-term relationships is often that people do evolve emotionally. I mean, I can't tell you how many men I've worked with.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
whose wives are going through menopause and they're like this is a completely different human being i i feel like i don't know this woman and she reports that too she's like i don't feel like i know who i am anymore i feel like i'm a completely different person so emotionally her landscape is entirely changing and and traditionally when you look at
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
some of the research that's out there, men generally, as they get older, will soften psychologically. So they become less harsh, less aggressive, less angry, and women go in the opposite direction. Generally speaking, women become harder as they get older emotionally. And I'm not really- Do you have any idea why that is? A big part of it is the chemical balances in your body.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So as you get older, less testosterone. And for women, it's the inverse, right? From my understanding, estrogen actually decreases. They have more testosterone in the body. And so they become more hard. I guess you could say more harsh, more aggressive. Some women become a little bit more angry post-menopause.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So we have to be able to ride the emotional waves that are naturally going to come along with everything, losing a job, changing careers, having kids, all of that type of stuff is going to induce different emotional states within you as an individual. And it's whether or not you and your partner have the ability to sort of weather the emotional storm together.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And you have the willingness to be transparent about what you're going through emotionally. I mean, I lost my mom last year. She passed away from cancer. And she had a pretty rough battle. She was dealing with addiction up until she got diagnosed with terminal cancer and then got sober after she was diagnosed, which is a whole other conversation. But it was tough. It was really tough.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
to watch her go through the chemo and the treatments and all of those different types of pieces. And I think one of the things that my wife was very good at was checking in on me. How are you doing? Where are you at? And my willingness to say, today sucks. And especially after she passed. I mean, the birth of my daughter happened after she passed. This was the first Christmas since she passed.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
But I think having worked with men for over a decade, tens of thousands of men from around the world, men feel very deeply. I think it's not that men don't feel, I think it's that men feel very deeply. And we've, in some cultures, created a vacuum of being able to teach men what to do with their emotions, how to actually traverse through their emotions. So I think those are parts of it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And my willingness to be transparent about This is joyful on the one hand, bringing my daughter into the world and having another kid, but also be very real and transparent about there's part of this that is brutal and there's a lot of grief and there's a lot of sadness. Instead of, I'm fine, I'm okay, let me just have another scotch and I'll feel better, which was like my old method.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's like, don't talk about how I'm actually doing. and just try and glaze over that with some type of substance, which I think is what most of us men do because we feel that for better or for worse, our intrinsic value comes from our ability to perform. And so we over-index our performance at all costs. And we oftentimes see our emotions as a hindrance to our performance.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's like, I won't be able to perform on whatever it is, right? On the trading floor, at work, in the office, and provide for my family if I let myself be emotional. So- Yeah, make the case for emotions for me. What use are they? Why are they important? So just like you have thoughts in your mind, those are sort of like the language of your thinking process. Your emotions are the data of the body.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
It's the information of your body. If you want any real truth in your life, you need to acquire as much data as humanly possible. The way I put it to a guy, he's a project manager for a big hedge fund on Wall Street. He asked me the same question, why should I care about how I feel? He's like, My wife says I should. I don't really buy it. I don't really get it.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And I said, okay, imagine that you are going to buy a stock, right? You're looking at buying Tesla. This is not financial advice. You're looking at buying Tesla and you don't look at the company's P&L statement. Like you just don't look at their balance sheet. you just buy the stock just because you think it's a good idea.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
That is what going through life without emotional information and emotional data is like. If you ignore your emotions, you're not looking at part of the balance sheet of your life. And you're trying to make decisions based purely on rationality and logic, which is already being informed by your emotions. So the case for it is, fullness, fulfillment, a deeper sense of meaning and purpose.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
If you want to find a deeper sense of meaning and purpose in life, your emotions are going to be part of the data and the information that leads you towards that. If you want to have a fulfilling relationship, Your emotions are going to be part of the data and the information that helps you choose the right partner.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And sometimes we're choosing the wrong people because our emotions are all messed up and we don't know how to sift through them. We don't know how to process them. We don't know how to decipher what our emotions are saying. Or sometimes we choose really dysfunctional relationships over and over and over and over and over again. because we're ignoring our emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
So there's a number of different reasons, but I'll use a Carl Jung quote to sort of close it off. He said, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. And for most of us, for all of us, our emotions are these oftentimes unconscious responses or reactions to things that are happening in our head or things that are happening outside in our world.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
And so until you start to become more deeply aware of and conscious to what you are experiencing emotionally, and you're able to regulate that, sift through it, process that, you're going to be walking through life, love, business, largely blind to a big part of the information of what brings you a deeper sense of aliveness, fulfillment, joy, the whole kit.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I always love this because... the more that I've worked with men, the more that I've realized that we always try and come at emotions from a rational standpoint.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
I'm curious what your thought is on that, though, as well, because even you talk to a lot of people in this space.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
That's right. Huberman's Feeling Your Feelings worksheet. I was going to make a joke to you before we started about how you've asked me to come on and talk about the topic that most men least want to talk about.
Modern Wisdom
#890 - Connor Beaton - A Man’s Guide To Feeling Your Feelings
This is one of those referral episodes, right? The opening's going to be like, ladies, refer this to your men.