TS: Hello, friends, my name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True. And I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium transformational docu-series, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows—including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
I also want to take a moment and introduce you to the Sounds True Foundation, our nonprofit that creates equitable access to transformational tools and teachings. You can learn more at soundstruefoundation.org and in advance, thank you for your support.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge my guest is Connor Beaton. Connor is the founder of Man Talks, an international organization dedicated to the personal and professional growth of men. He’s an entrepreneur, a beautifully gifted writer, a speaker, and a facilitator dedicated to building better men. With Sounds True, Connor is the author of a new book, it’s called Men’s Work: A Practical Guide to Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, and Find Freedom. Honestly, when it comes to understanding men and to being a guide and creating a framework for how men can grow in the deepest way, here’s someone I truly recommend, Connor Beaton. Take a listen.
Connor, welcome.
Connor Beaton: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate that warm introduction and glad to be here.
TS: I’m excited, as I said, to get to know you and to connect with you. And that excitement came from engaging with your book Men’s Work, and it started with the very first line of the book. So I open up the book, I’m not really sure what I’m going to encounter—Men’s Work—I don’t know, like am I going to connect with this book? Am I going to like it? What’s going on? And the first line: “The work of men begins with pain.” And as soon as I read that, I thought I’m really going to like the book and the author. Tell me why you decided to start that way and how men’s work begins with pain.
CB: Yes, I mean, I opened the book with that specifically because I think, in many ways, one of the things that we are lacking socially and culturally within masculine culture or male culture is just an understanding of how to deal with our own pain. And so I think there’s been this kind of absence that we would’ve normally been receiving—this transmission that we would’ve normally been receiving as men that would’ve taught us how to deal with trauma, abuse, abandonment, neglect, just the hardship that life would normally bring us. And there’s a great quote by Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan monk. I appreciate his work. And he said something along the lines of, and I’m paraphrasing, but he said something along the lines of, unless a man is brought through an experience of powerlessness, he will always abuse power. And part of powerlessness is experiencing some kind of pain.
And so in my own life, the pain that I experienced, no one really taught me how to deal with that, no one taught me what to do with that. And so it became the psychological and emotional fuel that caused me to lash out, act out—not keep myself on track, not have a sense of self-respect, self-love, self-appreciation. It became the pain that I would pass on to other people. And this is what I’ve seen as being the case for many men, is that when we don’t have a framework for how to deal with our pain as men, it leaks out into the relationships in our life. It leaks out into our marriages, into our relationships, into our parenting, into our work environments. It leaks out everywhere. And so I think the primary task, even when I look at the world today, I think one of the primary tasks that men are being asked to sort out is, how do you deal, as a man, with your own pain?
The task of understanding how to do that is not only worthy, but it can provide a depth of purpose and meaning within a man’s life that might be sorely lacking. And maybe I’ll just sort of end with this, I think that’s really the beating heart of what men’s work is, whether it’s my framework and what I talk about or teach or other versions that have come before me. It has always been about, how do you, as a man, interact with your pain? Because if you can do that, you can understand yourself and life at a depth that maybe you wouldn’t have understood before.
TS: I’m wondering if we can get more specific, Connor, because the word “pain,” it’s like this big throbbing, terrible, awful thing. I mean one way of looking at it is just feeling like pain, ouch. But very specifically, the pain that you had to face in yourself as part of your journey to teach men’s work, and your investigation into the pain that you felt you caused other people, and why that was such an important part of your journey.
CB: Yes. Well, I’ll try and do both of those things. In the opening, I talk about just this notion of: I’m a man who has been abused. I’m a man who has abused others. Or I’m a man who has been hurt, and I’m a man who has hurt others. And so part of my coming into manhood was reconciling with the pain that I experienced as a child, witnessing my parents’ divorce when I was very young, and having my parents remarry other people and grow entire family systems on their own, and bouncing back and forth between these two family systems. But then also experiencing neglect as a child and experiencing abuse as a child, verbally, emotionally, physically sometimes. And I think that’s the case for a lot of people, not everyone obviously, but that was the pain that I experienced as a boy.
For other people, it’s going to be very different, it’ll be bullying, it’ll be etcetera. But because I didn’t know how to deal with that pain of feeling alone, feeling isolated, experiencing in mistreatment sometimes as a child because, I didn’t know how to deal with that. And no one was s teaching me what to do with the energy that came along with that, the anger, the frustration, the bitterness, the resentment, and the fact that I didn’t think that it was socially acceptable for me to let my anger out unless it was in small pockets. I tried to push that down. I tried to stuff all of that hurt and that pain and that sadness down, because there’s a notion within male culture that tells men, whether inadvertently or directly, that there’s strength in suppression. That if you, as a man, feel something that you don’t like—anger, hurt, sadness, heartbreak—that how you deal with that to prove your manhood is to stuff it down, is to not necessarily deal with it.
And that the more that you can stuff down and the more that you can push it away, the stronger you will be. And so I bought into that and I think that a lot of guys buy into that notion. And the consequence of that was that I needed maladaptive behaviors. That’s a very sort of clinical term, but I needed bad habits in order to deal with the pain that I was carrying around, with the hurt that I was carrying around. And it led me to infidelity. It led me to pornography use. It led me to substance abuse, drugs, alcohol, riding my motorcycle at 340 kilometers an hour on the highway—just doing very reckless things.
And I think that this is the case for many men. The hurt that they’ve felt, whether it’s through heartbreak, whether it’s because their father was abusive, whether it was because their mother was neglectful or hypercritical or whatever the case was—if no one stepped into that man’s life and said, “Let me teach you how to deal with that hurt that you’ve been carrying around,” it will come out sideways. If he doesn’t have friends to talk to it about, if he doesn’t have people in his life that he can sort of mull it through or work it through, if he buys into this notion that I need to push this down in order to deal with it and that will make me stronger, then it will come out sideways in some way, shape or form, whether it’s drug abuse or substances or maladaptive behavior in some way. And so that’s why I think that it’s important. That’s how it showed up in my life. And hopefully I answered all your questions, because I think there were a couple in there.
TS: You did, you talked about the specifics of your own pain and also the pain that you caused other people. And I think studying the pain that perhaps we’ve caused other people—you mentioned infidelities and later, in Men’s Work, you talk about that and how that was so hurtful. That can also be, I think, an interesting way that we wake up our own pain. But recognizing the pain we’ve caused other people, that got my attention as just part of doing our growth work inspired by becoming sensitive to that. So thank you for pointing that out in the beginning. Now you write, “Don’t aim to eliminate or avoid your pain. Instead, learn to understand and carry it more effectively.” What does that mean, to carry our pain more effectively?
CB: It means that we all have parts within us that we dislike, that we become aware of, that we’re not necessarily excited about—our anxiety, maybe our rage, our anger, our depression, etcetera. And with our pain specifically, what it means to carry it more effectively is to become a kind of parent to that part of yourself. In the book, I talk about fathering yourself, fathering this part of you that might be hurt. So procuring the sort of tools that teach you to be a good steward of it, to build a relationship with it. The majority of ways that we deal with the aspects of ourselves that we don’t like, for example, if we have anxiety or we have stress that we don’t like or anger that we don’t enjoy or inner criticism that we don’t like, our tendency is to try and reject that part of us. It’s to try and banish that part.
Men especially, I’ve worked with men for over a decade now from all over the world, and the amount of men that say, “I wish I just killed this part off of me.” We take a very violent approach to it. So I wish I could just kill this part off. I wish I could just get rid of it. I wish I could just delete this part out of my mind. And that method only serves to embolden that part of us. So if we’re dealing with a very hurtful inner dialogue, if the way that we speak to ourselves is incredibly harmful—we’re berating ourselves and self-deprecating and internally, verbally berating ourselves—trying to get rid of that voice only serves to fuel it. And so we have to start to welcome it back in to our house, back into our home.
We have to be able to build a dialogue with it and set boundaries with it. And it’s not that it ever necessarily goes away, it’s not that we eradicate that part, but we actually learn how to be in relationship with it in a more effective way. And I think that that’s the key to a lot of this work. It’s being in relationship with the aspects of ourselves that we don’t like. And that’s what I’ve always sort of advocated for within this work. How do you learn to be in relationship with these parts of you? Whether it’s your past, whether it’s something that you did, a decision, a choice that you made, or an element of yourself that you dislike or don’t know how to deal with, how do you build a relationship with it? And in doing so, you carry it with you.
Again, it’s not that you kill that part off or eliminate it, it’s that you learn to be with it in a way where that energy, the psychological energy that would normally go to resisting that part, is freed up for you to continue on your path, freed up for you to continue to build intimacy. It’s not getting in the way. Jung said that, and I’ll just reference the shadow, which I think we’ll come back to at some point. He said that the shadow forms an unconscious snag that thwarts our most well-meaning intentions. And Mr. Francis Weller, an American therapist—it’s wonderful—said that, “Your pain has its own intelligence.” And so when I say that we have to learn how to carry our pain more effectively, it’s that not only do we have to learn how to build a relationship with it and understand it, stop rejecting it, but we have to learn that’s a part of us that has something valuable to offer our lives. And so that’s the sort of theory part of it, are you wanting me to get into what that actually looks like?
TS: I think it would be useful if you’d be willing to give an example and help us understand, especially as you’re describing this unconscious snag. Maybe you could give an example from your own life that would help us appreciate that.
CB: Yes. So the thing that comes to mind immediately, because I think it’s tangible and tactical, and it’s something that most people deal with, is inner dialogue, in our inner critic. When I was in my teens and twenties, the way I spoke to myself was incredibly damaging. I wouldn’t speak to anybody like that in my life back then or now or ever. And it was mean, it was cruel, it was violent and it caused me a lot of pain. And the more that part showed up, the more that inner criticism showed up, the more I wanted to get rid of it. And when I started to do this work, I started to build a kind of conversation with this part, a mentor of mine asked me a question. He said, “Does that inner critic that you’re carrying, does it sound familiar? Does it sound like anybody in your life?”
And I was like, yes, it sounds like one of my parents who was very critical, who was very sort of mean and berating and verbally abusive often. And so I started to realize that I was carrying the legacy of this individual, that the way that they treated me had lived on inside of me. And so rather than trying to battle that part of me, which is what I did as a teenager with this parent, I fought him and I would buck against him and I would yell and I would do everything that I could to try and shut it down, to shut down the way I was being treated. And so I was interacting with that inner critic in the exact same way, which is what most of us do. We dislike it, we battle it. And when I realized that I was carrying on the legacy of this other person, it freed up some space for me to say, OK, what is this part of me actually trying to say?
What is it trying to communicate? Is it all bad or is there some merit in what it’s saying? And then I could open up a bit of a dialogue to hear, OK, well that’s sort of abusive and I definitely don’t want that, I don’t need that. So I can set some boundaries and sort of create some structure about how this part of me is allowed to converse. And then from there, open up the dialogue to say, what is it that you’re actually trying to accomplish? This criticism, this inner critic, what are you trying to accomplish? And from there, that opened up a dialogue to be able to have a kind of deeper understanding of this part that was trying to prevent me, trying to protect me from failing, from getting things wrong, from being put in the same position that I was as a child.
So it was just trying to protect me and that was it. And so once I got that, then I could say, OK, well there’s merit in some of what you’re saying. And so that freed up a lot of the energy, that freed up a lot of the conversation between the inner critic and myself. And it honestly alleviated a lot of the duress, because the more that I ignored that part, the louder it got. And so that’s something very simple, and I think tactical, that most people can do. They can begin to just write down, what is this inner critic actually saying? Who does this inner critic sound familiar to? Is it saying the same things that a parent did, or a coach did, or a school bully? And are there certain ways that you want to stand up and set a boundary with that individual? And can you do that with that part of you? So that’s very specific to the inner critic, but I think hopefully that will paint a little bit of a picture of how we begin to interact with it.
TS: Now, Connor, one of the interesting things I found in engaging with Men’s Work, I was surprised by this, was how much, as a woman, I related to so many of the teachings and principles and so much of the framework that you offered. And of course, like many people, I have a strong masculine and feminine energy inside of me. And so I could relate a lot to many of the teachings that were directed to what you call the masculine core. So I’m curious, first of all, before I move on, what you think about that.
CB: Yes, I mean, when I set out to write this book, I think that there’s—most of the books that are written for men or to men are telling men how to be. They’re defining: this is what masculine is and what masculinity is and what you have to do in order to live in that space. This is what it means to be a man. And I didn’t want to do any of that. I didn’t want to prescribe to the reader what it meant to be a man. My hope was that by going through this work, the reader would have a deeper connection to their own masculine core, however they identify, whether you’re a man or a woman or whatever that looks like for you. And so to have a deeper connection to guide the reader to say, OK, how do I define masculinity? What might be getting in the way of me if I’m a man who feels disconnected from his anger?
What might it look like for me to connect to it in a healthy way, so I’m not avoiding it or it’s not coming out sideways? So I wanted to write the book specifically so that the reader might have a chance to define those things for themselves by really laying out some of the challenges that the majority of men will go through, or just people that are wanting to connect deeper to their own masculine essence, which I think in some ways in society, we’re all grappling with. What does it look like to connect to our own masculinity, our own masculine parts, our own masculine core, in a healthy way? And I think that’s something socially, relationally, and individually that we’re all really grappling with. And so I think Men’s Work, while it’s written specifically for men, I think is very applicable for everyone.
TS: And here’s something that I thought was really applicable for me, but I think men are really going to connect with this. You write about it as “the most dangerous rule of being a man.” If you’re struggling, don’t talk about it. And you say this is the one rule you must absolutely break. And what I noticed is that it’s one thing with friends to sort of show them our shiny side, and it’s another thing to show our friends the side of us that might really be struggling with a financial challenge or in our marriage or something like that. And so talk about why this is the one rule you must absolutely break.
CB: So I think it’s very commonplace. I grew up in just outside of Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada, which is kind of like the Texas of Canada. There’s lots of oil, there’s lots of cowboys, there’s lots of big trucks, there’s lots of guns, there’s lots of cattle, except it’s minus 30, probably six months out of the year. And a lot of the masculine culture that I grew up in had this sort of unspoken rule that says, if you’re struggling or if you feel any kind of insecurity or weakness, don’t talk about that and do not show it. Do not show that weakness. Do not talk about where you’re struggling.
And after I hit rock bottom, after my sort of shadow came to the surface—my indiscretions behind the scenes, my battle with substance abuse and these types of things—after they came out, I started to realize that not talking about my challenges in life was one of the core problems that was leaving me feeling isolated and disconnected from the people that I loved most.
And it really hit home in a conversation with a close friend of mine who I’d gone to university with, where I sat down and I told him everything that had been going on behind the scenes. I said, I’ve been unfaithful to this woman that I’d been dating for a number of years, and I’ve been struggling with X, Y, and Z, and sort of came clean and confessed a whole bunch of stuff. And he sat and listened patiently and I braced for some form of rejection. I braced for him to be like, OK, what do you need, or thanks for telling me or whatever. But he didn’t do any of that. He did say thank you. But then he proceeded to break down and told me that he had tried to take his own life about a month-and-a-half before. And it still makes me fairly emotional, because I thought I knew everything about this guy.
I thought I knew the type of Scotch that he liked to drink, the TV shows that he liked to watch, the women that he liked to date, the food that he liked to eat. And yet I didn’t know how he was struggling. And I didn’t know the depth to which he was struggling. And I felt powerless to be able to even support him. And that was true for me as well. I hadn’t let him into how I had been struggling and what was going on in my life and the truth about the parts of me that I didn’t like. So he didn’t know any of those things. And as I continued to have conversations with men in my life, I started to see this pattern. So many of us were abiding by this rule, this rule that said, if you are struggling, keep it to yourself, suck it up, stuff it down, pour some whiskey over the top of it, and figure it out yourself.
And if you can’t do that, there’s something wrong with you and that means that you’re less of a man. And what I realized was that as I broke the rule, as I started to share my experience with other men and say, look, here’s the dirty laundry that I’ve been hiding from you. Here’s the ghosts and the secrets in my closet, and here’s what I’ve been dealing with. It gave permission for them all todo the same thing. And I started to have much more meaningful, depth-oriented, and fruitful relationships with the men in my life. It felt free. I felt like I was much more free in those relationships, because I wasn’t constantly lying or hiding something or withholding something from them, and I really felt known. And so those are the types of relationships that I would wish not only for everyone but, because I do work with men, that’s the type of relationship that I wish for every man—is to break that rule so that they can have a chance at real intimacy.
Because oftentimes, this is the barrier that’s getting in the way from us as men, having our partners know us, having our kids know us, having our family members and friends know us. It’s the barrier that keeps people at arm’s length and stops them from being able to love the parts of us that maybe we haven’t yet come to terms with.
TS: Let’s talk about it, this rule in terms of our friends and family for a moment. We’ll leave our intimate partnerships aside for a second. But in terms of friends and family, I was thinking about, well, what keeps this rule alive that I understand and connect to? And it’s partially that I feel proud. I want people to think highly of me. I don’t want them to know the different ways I might be suffering, and I’m kind of competing too. And so I want to be like all super together when it comes to my career and my marriage and stuff. I want the people in my life to see that version of me. And so I’m wondering if you can address that in terms of, how do we make peace with showing people our underbelly?
CB: Yes, that’s a good one. I mean, I love the way you’re describing it because many, many men and many individuals that have a strong masculine orientation will develop more competition-based relationships. It’s just a natural byproduct of masculinity in some ways, there’s a very competitive spirit that’s baked into it. And so when you listen to a lot of men—and I’m just going to use that and then I’ll open up and broaden it, but it’s fine if you just sit at a bar and listen to men or you sit at a restaurant and listen to men or you’re in the workplace and you listen to men—their conversation, even if they’re very close, is very competition-based. They’re competing subtly. They’re trying to one-up one another in jokes or in their accomplishments or in their achievements, or even in the way that they describe their relationship.
And so if you just think logically about, what do you do when you’re in competition with somebody? Well, the one thing that you don’t do, you do not tell them your weakness. Because if you’re competing with somebody, you do not want them to know where you’re weak so you leave out that information, you leave out those details. And so the pathway that most of us—and what I usually advocate for in the book is, it’s not bad to compete with friends and whatnot in your life. But we need to move to more challenge-oriented relationships, where we can open ourselves to having friends or even family members challenge us and say, hey, listen, I noticed that you said that you have wanted to be drinking less alcohol lately, but last night you had four or five beers. What’s going on? Or, hey, I noticed that you’ve been talking about not wanting to eat sugar or go to bed earlier or meditate more, but I haven’t seen you doing that. What’s going on?
And so in that way, we allow ourselves to challenge one another, and then we also open ourselves to the challenging part of revealing the aspects of ourselves that we’re struggling with. And in doing so, we move out of that competition-based relationship. We send the signal of, I’m not competing with you. I’m not interested in trying to one-up you anymore. And that that might mean that you need to start that with specific people in your life. And I think it’s maybe a little bit different between family and friends. Sometimes in family dynamics, depending on your relationship with your parents, you might be trying to still gain their attention or still get their validation or still get their recognition, and that in itself is a form of competition.
So the degree to which you want your parents’ recognition and validation is likely to this same degree that you do not want them to know where you’re struggling and feel weak, because you want them to recognize your achievements and accomplishments and your successes. And so we have to be able to move out of that, and we just practice it in a safe environment. This is why things like men’s groups can be so potent for allowing men to broach some of these conversations where they might not feel free to do that in other environments.
TS: You know Connor, there’s something related here that’s really important, and I want to make sure I get the nuance. So I’m going to read your own words, and it has to do with the conundrum of male vulnerability. And so we’re talking about how we have to break this rule, share how we’re struggling, let ourselves be known. You could say, be vulnerable with the people in our lives and with our spouse, indeed. And here you write, “Modern dating and relationships have put men in a double bind. On the one hand, men are told they need to be more vulnerable, open up and talk about their emotions. However, the reality is that most women still crave strong, assertive, and stable men. And men know this, which leaves deep confusion about how to be strong, stable, and assertive, while also being vulnerable, open, and actively showing the soft underbelly of the emotional self.” So how do men navigate this double bind of male vulnerability?
CB: Well, if there were anything like me, they likely weren’t doing it very well or aren’t doing it very well. For a long time, I did not get that part right. But I think it is a bit of a challenge for a lot of men in our modern culture because the narrative is that vulnerability is sort of the cure-all solution to what allows men socially, relationally, interpersonally—and I agree that being vulnerable is important, but I also think that there’s other things that men feel like they’re lacking. And so how we usually go about doing this is—I do think that men require spaces with other men, oftentimes, to be able to have and practice the art of opening up and being vulnerable alongside other men. Because if you can do it in that space, it will not only embolden you but it is sort of a training ground for you to practice that, to say here’s where I’m struggling, here’s what I’m dealing with that I don’t know how to sort of solve or fix, or here’s how I’m hurting.
For a lot of men, it’s very challenging to tell another man, I’m hurting, I’m suffering. I feel like my heart’s broken after the divorce. It’s very, very challenging. So I think it’s important for men to get in environments where they feel safe enough to do that. And it’s not to say that they can’t bring that to their relationship or shouldn’t bring that to their relationship. I think it’s just that they need some practice, because otherwise what can happen, and what I see happening a lot, is that a man will bring his vulnerability into his relationship. And a couple things can sometimes happen. One, he can get sort of rejected and shut down, it might be not the right time, he might not share it in the right way, or it is just not received by his partner. Or two, what happens quite a bit is that his partner turns into his emotional processing center.
And so she starts to occupy this role of helping him sort out how he’s feeling and why he’s feeling that way. And slowly, codependency will start to creep in and he will continue to come to his partner and say, here’s how I’m feeling, and here’s what’s going on at work or with my mom or with my buddies. But oftentimes he won’t go and do things outside of it. He’ll share with his partner emotionally, but then he won’t go take action to change things outside of the dynamic. So I think the major thing is finding, even if it’s just one friend, one man in your life that you can go and open up to and have that kind of bond with, or joining a men’s group or whatever that is a support group of some form. Because our grief needs to be shared; our vulnerabilities require community.
And in some cases, we actually just need to practice the skill of opening up, which might be very foreign. And I think to do so around other men is also emboldening, because you see examples of men who are just very real and who have put time and effort into understanding themselves at a depth that can be inspiring for you as a man. Because I think one of the things that we’ve missed in our culture, and one of the things that I think is very challenging for a lot of men that are growing up in our society, is that there’s this sort of plague, this absence of male role models, absence of fathers that are present within young men’s lives. And so they don’t even have an example of what it could look like for a man to be vulnerable. So it’s very hard to do something that you’ve just never seen. So I would say that those are some of the practical things specifically that a man could do to open up.
TS: Let’s keep going with this because I get what you’re saying about practicing and training and developing this new skill with other men. But let’s just pretend here I am and I’m dating women and they’re saying things to me like, “Tell me what’s really going on. What are you feeling?” And the truth is what you’re feeling are really extreme states, and you’re not quite sure that on date number one or two, or whatever, that this is the time to reveal all of this. How do you navigate that?
CB: I think probably the best way to go about it is to try and resource yourself outside of that relationship. So I’ll talk about how to deal with that specific moment, but I think if that happens, the best thing you can do is to resource yourself outside of that relationship to say, OK, can I hire a coach or a therapist, or is there somebody in my life that I can talk to about some of these intense feelings or emotions. In that moment, I think there’s a couple simple questions that you can ask to see if it’s really the right person or the right space, right? Because I think there is such a thing as sharing too much too soon and with not the right person, it’s just true. Not everybody—what is it that Brené Brown says? “Vulnerability is earned.” And so I think there is such a thing as trying to share too much too soon.
And sometimes people might want that from you for whatever reason. And so a very simple question, what I would probably ask in that moment is, why do you want to know that? Why do you want to know? What are you looking for? Are you trying to get to know me better or is there something that you’re trying to understand about me? What are you actually trying to understand? And so I think I would just inquire and get curious about what is it specifically that you’re wanting to know about me? And then I would really encourage that individual to gauge for themselves whether or not it’s the right time, the right place, and the right person. Because forced vulnerability can be dangerous, I think, for an individual, especially if that man has never opened up to anybody before and he’s dealing with something pretty heavy, and that he does take the risk to open up, and then that individual never calls him again.
I mean, that can be crushing for that person. He might not ever open up. So I think just inquiring a little bit more and then using some individual discernment to say, is this the right person that I want to take that risk with and open up with? And if it is, then that’s on you, right? Then you own that decision to say, OK, I’m going to take the risk even if it doesn’t go well. And then how you go about that is by sharing what you’re experiencing without making their person responsible. OK, what does that look like? It might look like saying, truth be told, I’m dealing with thinking about changing a career. I’ve been in this career for a decade, and I don’t know if I really want to stay in it any longer. I’m actually thinking about quitting my job and starting my own company, and that feels really risky. I don’t need you to do anything with that, but since you asked, I’m just going to be honest about that.
And not put the other person in a position of having to solve that problem for you or give you feedback or any of those other things. So that’s the opening up and being vulnerable, really saying, here’s what I’m feeling, here’s what I’m experiencing, here’s what I’m going through, and you you’re not responsible for it.
TS: It’s a very good answer. Recently, I was asked about this in the context of leadership, and I thought I would ask you the question, which is, there’s so much talk about how, when you can lead with this forthcomingness of what’s really going on inside of you, it connects you to other people, they know what’s happening. And this person, a gentleman was saying, it hasn’t been going so well for me as I’m vulnerably sharing my serious fear about the potential collapse of our organization, I’m not inspiring people. I’m freaking everybody out. Could you please give me some guidelines here for how to be truthful, connected, vulnerable, and inspiring at the same time? So I’m wondering what you would say to such a man.
CB: Oh man. I would say welcome to the fullness of life, grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. But all jokes aside, I think leadership in many ways is how we conduct ourselves through hard times. And each individual needs to discern for themselves what that looks like for them. And maybe for that individual, it’s not necessarily about causing chaos by revealing what’s happening, but it is about having a sense of owning what the truth is for you individually. Hey, this is going on with the company, I’m not too sure where things are going to go and I’m open to having a conversation about what you guys might think we can do in order to course correct. Sometimes leadership is about bringing the community together as you’re about to enter into the eye of a storm versus being the captain that says, I’ll sail the ship through the storm by myself and not let anybody know.
And so again, what that looks like logistically is going to be different case by case. But I do think that what I would say is find a way for you to, first and foremost, lead yourself towards your own truth of how you want to navigate through this and come out the other side with a sense of self-respect, even if it goes sideways, even if the company collapses, even if people are mad at you and disappointed at you. Because in situations like that, it’s very hard to appease everybody. And so the one thing that you can do is lead yourself through it with a sense of respect, and not pride and not honor, because I think that that’s too granulose. But a sense of self-respect that you might not get it right and give yourself that grace to do so. And then you can determine how much you want to bring people into the equation of how much do I reveal? How much do I tell them?
Because maybe telling them that collapse is imminent within a week is going to cause more chaos, more harm than good. So I think that it’s a lot of discernment once you decide, how do I lead myself through this, and how would I want to be led through it? I think that’s also a very important question that every leader should ask themselves, how would I want to be led through this? So yes.
TS: You introduced this interesting term, emotional sovereignty, that we can have emotional sovereignty when we’re going through a lot of different challenging emotional experiences. Tell me what that means. What does it mean for a man to demonstrate emotional sovereignty?
CB: It means that I have a depth of awareness around what I’m actually feeling and experiencing. It means that I’m sensitive enough to stay in contact with what I’m feeling. It means that I’m taking responsibility for those things, that I’m not outsourcing my emotional health and wellness to other people. I’m not tasking and making other people responsible for my volatility or my anger or my resentment or my grief or any of those things. I can share in what I’m feeling because that’s a part of what makes me emotionally sovereign. It’s that I can say, here is what I’m feeling. I’ll share a very personal example. I shared this in my men’s group the other day that I’ve been with for a very long time. My mom last year was diagnosed with stage four cancer, and it’s been a very challenging time to go through having a newborn child.
My son’s not even two years old, and there was a moment in time where I wasn’t too sure if she would actually get to meet him, which was devastating for me. And so emotional sovereignty is being able to say, I feel a tremendous amount of grief around the impending loss of my mother. And I feel a tremendous amount of grief at the thought that my son might not have memories of her. But emotional sovereignty is saying, that’s not somebody else’s burden to carry, and it’s not their responsibility to fix or solve that for me. And so I don’t task other people with having to try and solve, try and fix, or try and make me feel better.
I take responsibility for what I need. Because sometimes I can carry that grief well, and sometimes I can’t. There’s moments where I look at my boy and I say, if my mom passes in a few months, what’s it going to be like for him to not have grown up with her in his life? And I get to share that with my wife and say, I feel tremendous sadness about my son not maybe knowing my mom. And again, in sharing that there’s a beauty, a connection, an intimacy, but there’s a sovereignty in the sense that it’s like I’m the one that’s feeling it. And if I don’t do that, then inevitably what happens is I make her responsible for it, or I make somebody else responsible for it, or it comes out sideways in anger and bitterness. So that’s really what emotional sovereignty is.
It’s the really deep awareness of what am I actually feeling moment to moment, and then, excuse me, not ownership over that emotion, but the ability to be honest with myself and then, subsequently, be honest with the people that I love most, the people that have access to my inner heart, my inner home. And I think in many ways, that type of emotional sovereignty is what builds a really deep kind of intimacy with another—to say, here is what I’m carrying, here’s what I’m feeling, here’s what I’m going through. And it’s not for you to take on, it’s for me to navigate, but I want you to know what’s in me.
TS: What I’m curious about, Connor, is those times when we get hijacked—I hear what you’re saying about emotional sovereignty, it sounds great. And what I’ve noticed in my own experience is that often I get there, but I don’t always get there right away. Sometimes in the moment, I’m gone. I don’t have that kind of, I’m responsible, I have a perspective on this, I’m processing it, I’m working it, I have my counsel that I’m talking to. In the moment, I’m hijacked, and then everything calms down a little bit and I start reflecting, and I can find that place of emotional sovereignty again, but I leave. What do you do when you leave?
CB: Yes. Well, I mean, this is something that I work a lot with men on, because anger is oftentimes the emotion that’s most acceptable for men, that they most allow themselves to feel. And so a lot of times, guys will come and work with me and say things like, ah, I just lost it. I just lost it, and I was angry and I was shut down, and I closed off. And my first question is always, what did you lose? If you just stop and pause and think about what did you lose? Well, what you lost is your consciousness. You lost your conscious capacity to respond. You went unconscious, and you began to respond from that emotion. So the first thing that we can do to kind of be tactical with this, because that might be helpful, the first thing that we can do is get very clear on what the signs are, very clear on what the signs are, when you’re building up to that kind of reactivity, when you’re building up to that kind of losing your conscious capacity to respond and self-soothe and self-regulate.
For me, it’s like when I’m feeling reactivity and anger start to brew, it usually happens lower in my core and my belly, and then it moves up into my chest, and then by the time it’s up here, I’m gone. And I think that’s the case for most of us. So get very clear on what the signs are, write them down, share them with your partner, share them with a person that maybe you get the most reactive with, or become the least emotionally sovereign with, which just happens to, in a very lovely way, be most of the time our partner. So that’s step one. Step two is when it’s happening, name it out loud, call it out. I try and do this as often as possible to say, you know what? I’m really reactive right now, or I feel very angry right now, or I’m getting close to not being able to respond in a meaningful way.
So I think we need to pause. So name it out loud. And if you can’t continue, if you know that you’re just in that space where it’s not healthy for you to continue, or you’re not going to be able to have a meaningful conversation with your partner, then pause. Say you know what, I need to pause for five, ten minutes. And then go and sit down and breathe and be with your emotion. If you can carry on, then say what it is that you’re feeling behind, that reactivity behind that anger. Because for most of us—and there’s a lot of debate about this in the therapeutic and psychological field—but for most of the times, anger is a secondary emotion. We feel embarrassed first, we feel disrespected, we feel ashamed, and then we move to that anger, then we move to that sort of unconscious reactive place or we become needy or whatever it is, where we are not emotionally sovereign. We’re blaming, we’re pointing the finger, etcetera. So if you’re able to do it, then in that moment you could say, well, I’m actually feeling embarrassed, or I actually feel ashamed, or I actually feel sad that you didn’t want to, whatever the case may be.
And then lastly, and this is the big one that I work with a lot of men on, is move away from rationalizing and move into sensation. Reconnect to your breath, reconnect to the body, because when we say that we’ve lost it, not only have we lost our consciousness, but our nervous system has just become dysregulated. And so we’re just in a wildly dysregulated state. And so a lot of the work that I talk about in the book is actually about how do you, as a man, regulate yourself, ground yourself, and return to a kind of center. And the breath is the conduit for that. A lot of the research that’s out there shows that the breath is this sort of hinge between the stress part of the nervous system, the sympathetic, and the calm part of the nervous system, which is the parasympathetic.
So return to the breath, feel your feet on the floor, bring your awareness down back into the body. See if you can reconnect to some of the sensation that you’re actually physically feeling. Breathe into that and see if you can press some of that energy back down into the floor. Because again, for most of us, what happens is all that energy just moves up into our head. And that’s why we get hijacked, is our locus of focus is just on our thoughts, on the judgment, on the criticism, on the blaming, and then we’re lost. So those are some very specific things that you can do to regain that sense of sovereignty. And again, if those things aren’t working, then pause. The pause is always going to be your best friend when it comes to conflict. And I would say have a very clear sense of what a cause for pause is, for yourself and in your relationship. It’ll do wonders. It’ll just do wonders.
TS: All right. There’s one more big section of Men’s Work that I want to talk to you about, and it’s the section called “Illuminating Infidelity and Porn.” And you write about this, both of these issues from a very personal place of how infidelity and porn have played a big role in your life and in your process of growth, evolution, and development. And you’ve worked a lot of stuff out in relationship to infidelity and porn, and now you work with men on these issues. So illuminate us. This is an area where I was like, oh, I don’t know anything about this. In a way, help me.
CB: I was going to say, I don’t know how many authors in general write about pornography, but yes, so maybe we’ll start with infidelity. Oftentimes infidelity is revealing something that is missing, both within the individual and within the relationship. So as an example, I never really cheated or was unfaithful in my relationships because I wanted to leave those relationships. Now, that might sound very counterintuitive to a lot of people, but the truth is that a lot of men aren’t being unfaithful because they want out of the relationship. They’re being unfaithful because there’s something that’s lacking, either that they feel is lacking within them—a sense of confidence, a sense of being able to be sexually honest, the capacity to feel like they are connected in their relationship—or that there’s something that they feel is missing from the relationship, some form of communication, some form of transparency, etcetera.
And so what will oftentimes happen is that that man will go and seek that outside of the relationship. And so for me personally, again, just to make it very personal, what would oftentimes happen is that I would be in a relationship with a woman that I really loved, I really cared about, but my sexual expression, I felt a kind of resistance towards bringing it into the relationship. And so I would love the person that I was with, but I would go and find women that I wanted to be just sexual with and feel fully sexually free and explore what I wanted with them. And those two things didn’t come together. And so for a lot of men—not all men, this isn’t every single case, but for a lot of men—that’s a part of what ends up happening. They love their partner, they love the person that they’re with, but there’s something within them, some form of sexual expression that for whatever reason, they don’t feel like they can bring into the relationship fully.
And so eventually, something happens and they either seek it outside of the relationship or circumstances bring it into their life. I think within our modern culture as well, it’s very easy because of Instagram and social media and whatever social media platform you’re on, it’s very easy to come across people and individuals that you can just converse with and spark up some kind of online pseudo relationship with. So that’s a little bit about why infidelity happens. Again, it’s not always the case.
Where pornography fits into this, and then I’ll sort of just pass the baton back to you and have you poke around a little bit more in some of those areas. Where porn fits into the picture is, and I’m trying to condense some of this down because I think it’s a huge topic, specifically for men, I think it fits into the picture in the sense that, as I talked about in the book, porn is what’s called a supernormal experience.
So it’s an above normal experience. So if you think about having a Thanksgiving meal or a Christmas meal or whatever, you generally eat more than you normally would. You could just consume more than you normally do, and that’s a supernormal experience. And your body can handle that. Your body can actually metabolize and digest that amount of food or information. And porn is very similar. It’s a supernormal experience. You are consuming more sexual content and more sexual information than you normally would, right? The average 15-year-old boy in 60 minutes of watching pornography can view more nudity than any human being would’ve experienced an entirety of their lifespan in the past. Just the volume of pornographic content that you can have access to is massive. So what does that do? Why is that important?
Well, it does a few things. One, it can very quickly desensitize your system, so it can elevate your expectations for what you want sexually. It can create an internal dialogue where you are expecting yourself to perform a certain way. It can lead you down the path to not feeling sexually satisfied in your relationship. And it can also become the sort of mistress in the relationship. So when things are challenging in your relationship and you don’t feel sexually connected, or there’s something that you want to explore sexually, but you feel a little embarrassed or a little shy or apprehensive, it is easier to just go and watch pornography and go and watch that fantasy or that role play or that power dynamic acted out on a screen. It’s much less risky to view that than it is to go and try and create that within your intimate relationship.
The other thing that I would say about pornography is very clearly biased, because I struggled with pornography when I was younger and have done a lot of work to let that go. But I’ve never tried to take a stance. In the book, I’m not saying porn is good or bad, because I think that the debate about whether porn is good or bad is less relevant than if you are an individual that doesn’t want to watch porn and you can’t stop, what do you do? Because for a lot of guys that I’ve worked with over the years, porn becomes a tool for them to regulate and down-regulate their nervous system. So when they’re stressed, when they’re overwhelmed, when they’re bored, when they’re lonely, when they’re angry, when they feel rejected by their wives or their girlfriends or their partners, porn is there to help them feel better. It’s there to give them a dopamine release in the brain, feel a little bit happier, and forget about what they were actually feeling before. And it’s a very easy way to move into your parasympathetic nervous system. So that’s probably a lot of information, maybe I’ll just pause there.
TS: Yes. Well, what I think is interesting, Connor, there’s so much, but Men’s Work is really a guide, as you read it, to investigate yourself. It’s really a guide that says, here are some questions you can ask yourself, look at your experience, look inside. And so let’s say somebody’s reading this section about porn and they’re recognizing that it is getting in the way of their intimacy with their partner. It’s in the way and they want to engage less. Sounds like you were in that situation at some point in your life and you’ve worked with men in that situation. What do you recommend? I mean basically, if they’re saying the truth is it’s kind of an addiction to this super, super state, as you describe it.
CB: The first thing, and this is from a lot of research that’s come out of Stanford, as an example. And I had a wonderful researcher, PhD from Stanford, come on my show and talk about this, is to go on what’s called a “dopamine detox.” So to actually remove pornography. You’ll probably need some accountability to do this, and you might need a couple tries. But make a commitment that you’re going to not watch pornography and you’re going to remove certain things that you would normally get dopamine from—social media, etcetera—and to go on a dopamine detox for about 30 days. Just start there, to just try and see what it’s like to not watch pornography for 30 days or 60 days, whatever time period feels relevant for you. So that’s step number one.
Step number two is what I recommend to most men or women that maybe fall into this category. When you feel the urge to go and watch pornography, a very tactical thing that you can do is to set a timer for four or five minutes, sit down, close your eyes, take a few breaths, and tune in to what you’re actually feeling. Just notice, to make a practice. Every time you want to watch porn, tune in to what you’re actually feeling. For the majority of people, what they’ll find is that eight or nine times out of ten, it’s not that they’re actually aroused, it’s that they are stressed or anxious or lonely or bored. And so once you realize what you’re actually feeling in that moment, which is maybe not sexual arousal, it’s some other state, then you can work with that state, right? If you’re bored, go pick up a book. If you’re feeling lonely, go call a friend. If you have a tremendous amount of energy in your body, maybe go for a run or go workout or go do yoga or any number of things.
Tuning into what you’re feeling before you want to watch pornography is part of breaking the cycle, because if you don’t know what you’re feeling, then you can’t regulate that state. So that’s a big part of what I talk about in the book, is being able to use some of these very simple tools to create and interrupt the pattern of pornography. And the last thing that I’ll say, one of the things that’s very helpful is to understand your ritual around watching pornography. For many people, it’s become ritualized for a lot of people, so they’ll watch it at a certain time of day, in a certain room, they’ll watch a certain type of content. And so to get clear on your ritual around viewing this can also be very helpful, because you can replace that ritual. So part of what you want to do is interrupt that pattern so you can create a different ritual for yourself when you know what it normally looks like.
TS: And then just one question about illuminating infidelity, and we’ll make it a personal one, because you share in Men’s Work about this pattern in your life. I’m presuming this is no longer a pattern, I’m presuming that. What enabled you to make that shift? What did you have to do using your Men’s Work framework, what kind of transformation did you have to go through? What did you have to face?
CB: So a big part of what I had to face was what we were discussing before, which was bringing that my sexual desires and what I wanted to explore sexually into the confines of my relationship and really say, this is who I am, and this is the type of power dynamic that I enjoy. This is the type of role play that I want to experience. These are the types of things that I actually want to do, which was uncomfortable. As somebody who was used to pushing that out into other relationships, bringing that into my primary relationship was very challenging, very uncomfortable, but well worth it. And so that was a big part of it. Second was being able to build more meaningful and depth-oriented relationships with other men in my life. One of the challenges that, one of the reasons, and this is maybe not what most people expect, but one of the reasons why I would have these affairs or infidelities was because I had much deeper relationships with women in my life than I did with men.
I barely had any substantial relationships with men in my life, and I was just constantly around women. And so as I built more male friendships, more masculine relationships that had depth and substance and meaning in them, I found that I was satiated relationally. And so as I brought myself into my primary relationship with my now wife, it was much easier to just be honest and transparent, because I was having a lot of my needs met elsewhere through the men that were in my life. I could be honest with them, I could be open, I could share my challenges, I could share what I was struggling with. Because what I found was that oftentimes, how the affairs would start, how the infidelities would start, was that I would be sharing something that I was struggling with with a woman who was in my life, who I was a friend with, and that type of emotional intimacy would lead to sexual intimacy.
And I found that having emotional intimacy with other men made it so that I didn’t need to get that kind of attention from women. And the last thing that I’ll say, and this is the big one, is self-recognition and self-validation. A lot of the affairs, a lot of the infidelity that I had was because I was wildly insecure and I just didn’t like myself. I didn’t like who I was. And so it was easier to get somebody else to tell me that they liked me. And it was easier to get validation from women. I figured out how to do that at a very young age. And so when I built a system—and I talk about this in the book, because I did not have a system—of self-recognition, and this is, I think a thing that a lot of guys struggle with, is that I was really verbally abusive to myself internally, and I really did not like myself.
And so as I became somebody that I could trust and respect, and as I began to recognize myself for accomplishments, for achievements, for efforts, being disciplined, working out, taking care of myself, eating healthier, etcetera, and I could actually be grateful towards myself for those things. I stopped seeking that kind of validation from women, because my whole life in my late teens and early twenties was just revolved around seeking validation from women.
TS: Now, you said you developed a system for self-recognition. What’s the system?
CB: Well, so when I say system, I mean I developed a kind of internal framework of recognizing myself. The system would be, I mean, I’ll sort of say what I did, and I talked about this in the book. For probably about six or seven months, I made it a commitment to sit down and write something that I was grateful for every single morning. But it wasn’t just, I’m grateful for X, Y, and Z. It was here’s what I’m grateful for, here’s how it makes me feel, and here’s why it’s important. So it actually checked off two other boxes that I think oftentimes most gratitude frameworks miss, which is the rational mind, which needs to know why it’s important, and the heart, how it actually makes us feel. So it needs to be anchored into our mind and anchored into our heart. So every single day, I would just, here’s what I’m grateful for, here’s what I’m proud of, here’s what I respected myself for today.
And I had a series of about five or six different questions that I would go through every single day and then fill out. Over time, it just embedded into my thought process, where I could actually go through the day and say, oh, I’m grateful that, I just did that. Oh, I appreciate that I just took care of that. Or that helps me trust myself. That is important because of X, Y, Z, that makes me feel this way. And so eventually it just became second nature. So my self-deprecation got replaced by self-validation.
TS: I’ve been talking to the author of the new book, Men’s Work. It is a gorgeously written guidebook to the kind of deep growth work that Connor Beaton has been talking to us about today. Men’s Work: A Practical Guide to Face Your Darkness, End Self-Sabotage, and Find Freedom. Connor, thank you so much for all the work you’ve done on yourself and have done now for a decade with men to be able to write a book like Men’s Work. Thank you.
CB: Thank you.
TS: And if you’d like to watch Insights at the Edge on video and participate in after-the-show Q&A conversations with featured presenters and have the chance to ask your questions, come join us on Sounds True One, a new membership community that features premium shows, live classes, and community events. Let’s learn and grow together. Come join us at join.soundstrue.com. Sounds True: waking up the world.
