HealthyGamerGG - The Biggest Skill Issue For Men

Episode Date: May 4, 2024

Did you know that most men will go to an ex-partner for emotional support before they talk to their male friends? In today's episode, Dr K defines "emotional quotient" or "EQ", how men specifcally tend to lack skills in this area, and then outlines a number of ways that men can improve their emotional skillset to thrive in today's world. Find more resources on our website: https://bit.ly/3xsk6fE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, y'all. Today we're going to talk about core EQ or emotional quotient skills that men need to improve their life. So men are struggling a lot right now. The suicide rates are an all-time high. We've got a loneliness epidemic. We have a large number of men that for the first time in history are NEETs, not in employment, education, or training. So men are really struggling. And when people talk about this problem, they'll talk about societal kinds of things. Like, we need to raise awareness. There are papers about... things like the loss of third spaces, right? So these are places that we used to hang out and get to know each other. But as these things are disappearing, we're still left with a fundamental problem, which is like, yeah, like this stuff is a problem, but who's going to fix it? Who is taking the

responsibility for actually improving the lives of men? And that's right, because as men, it's up to us, right? We're independent. We're self-sufficient. Women and children get access to the lifeboats, but we as men need to solve problems on our own. And this is something that we see a lot even on the Internet. The men's lonely in this epidemic is not going to be solved by women. So this is a post that, interestingly enough, I don't even disagree with, right? So right now, one of the biggest problems that men struggle with is that their primary source of emotional support

is usually their female romantic partners in heteronormative relationships. And there's even research about this. So let's kind of take a quick look at a paper. So I tried to call up my ex-wife now day after discharge, which she wouldn't answer the phone. I sent her a message saying, can you please call me because we need to talk about things that can't be said in a text message? So she called me and I told her about what had happened the night before, about how I'd been to the hospital. And she said, I'm going to hang up now. And I said, no, no, no, I have to tell you what happened.

And she said, I'm going to hang up now. I'm going to get you somebody who can help you. This is from a paper called masculinity and mental illness in and after men's intimate partner relationships. So this paper very well highlights a huge problem that men have, which is that we rely on women for emotional support. And even after they break up with us or we break up with them or after there are exes, these are the only places that we know how to go. And I think understandably, women are fed up with it. So today, we're going to talk about core skills that you can use. And if you got pissed off by this, that's okay.

We're going to address that too. Core skills and things that you can do to actually improve your relationships and skills that you can develop to better handle the problems that you face as a man. When people hear that we offer coaching at HG, their first question is like, what on earth even is that? So here's the basic problem. When you struggle with something in your life, you don't see the problem. from the outside. You see it from the inside. The value of a coach is that they can look at your life from the outside. They can understand what's going on and they can help guide you to improve things like motivation, accomplish short-term goals, and even increase a sense of purpose in life.

And over the long term, we also see improvements in feelings of depression and anxiety. And the best part is we've had over 100,000 coaching sessions and we incorporate that feedback to continually improve our program. So if y'all are interested, in actually making a change in your life. Check out the link in the description below. So the first thing that we need to talk about is compartmentalization. So men tend to compartmentalize our relationships.

So we tend to have this group of buddies that I game with. These are my outdoor friends. This is my family. Those aren't my friends. These are different kinds of people. So as men, we tend to compartmentalize very, very heavily. And one of the compartments that we make is that women are the people that are our primary

source of emotional support, and they're also the people that we want to get romantically involved with. We tend to tie the two things together. Now, this creates all kinds of problems. When we compartmentalized relationships like this, we get stuck into these dynamics of girlfriend zone and friend zone. So we as men are socialized to express only emotional vulnerability with usually the women in our lives. So these are usually people like mothers, sisters, or girlfriends. And when we express this emotional vulnerability with other men, we tend to get made fun of or they don't know how to deal with it. Let's look at some more research. So this is from a different paper, which we'll talk about, but I needed to get lots of courage together to tell a friend of mine, and I kind of said,

I think I'm depressed. And he's like, ah, that's a shame. Laughs. And it didn't really go anywhere, you know? It felt like I invested, put myself out there on a limb and built up, and had to sort of build myself up to a struggle to get the words out, even to say the actual words. It was a struggle to say the actual words. And it came out real sort of bland. And it probably didn't sound like much, but it didn't really go anywhere. I guess because beyond just saying, I'm depressed, you kind of need to talk about it more than that, right? Right? So if you're a dude listening to this, you know exactly what this person is going through. Let's take a look at another example. I could tell because we know each other so well that he was passing a sort of judgment on me,

and it was a passive thing for him. But it was just like, that's how it is, man. And then he was sort of like, yeah, yeah. He sort of understood. Like, you could just see that it was difficult for him to be like, okay, and how does that work? And I'd be like, I don't know. So in that sense, I haven't confided in many other people. This is from a paper called masculinity, social connectedness, and men's and mental.

health, men's diverse patterns of practice. If we look at this situation, what do we see? We see that we as men do not know how to engage with other men. And this creates huge problems. This creates all kinds of problems for women because women are left with the burden of our emotional support outside of romance. And this is why if you look at men who go through a breakup, there is a fourfold increase in suicidal risk post-breakup. Why is that? That's because because when we lose a girlfriend or wife, we also lose our best friend who emotionally supports us. So it's kind of like everything falls apart all at once because we do not have social connectedness systems outside of the women that we date. And we absolutely need to build those.

And I'm going to teach you how to do that here and now. So the first thing to understand is we need to learn a different kind of language. So as we saw in these examples, we as men don't know, and this isn't our fault, we don't know how to communicate our emotional needs to other people. So as men, we also know that when you go to a dude with a problem, the dude will go into caveman problem solving mode, right? So if you go to a friend and you say, hey, bro, I'm depressed. Your friend will say like, ah, me, no depressed, go to gym, build confidence, get sexier, this will help, or man have beer. So when we go to other men, to discuss our problems, what ends up happening is that they offer something called instrumental support.

So when men try to support other men, we don't just talk about our problems because there's no point in that, right? We offer solutions. So what we're going to teach you is how to use the language of instrumental support, but to gain emotional support and not need to rely on the women or girlfriends in our life. Okay? So I'll give you all a couple of sample things that you can say. So the first is, hey, man, I need to. help thinking through some stuff. Hey man, I need help sorting through my emotions. Hey man, I need

help clearing my head. And so when a man hears this, this is when they will understand and provide the support that you need. Ah, man, no, sometimes head have lots of thoughts. Sometimes in head is confusing. Can help to get things out of head. Empty head is good head. So in these moments, what you were actually doing is asking for instrumental support, hey, bro, help me sort through these emotions. I'm not looking to go to the gym. I'm not looking to get introduced to your girlfriend's BFF. I'm not looking for any of that stuff.

I need help with what is on the inside. And the best way to do that is to say, hey, I need help with dot, dot, dot, dot, and then some kind of emotional statement. Because if you say something like, I'm depressed, you're going to get this kind of answer because men don't know how. to respond to that. And so this is the second thing that we're going to teach you is how to deal with that awkwardness.

It's not just that we need to say these kinds of things to get the right kind of support. It's that we also need to learn how to deal with the awkwardness. We don't know what to say. We don't know what to do. So this is where we're like, hey, bro, I'm depressed. And someone else is like, yeah, man, it do be like that sometimes. And then y'all both shrug, y'all fist bump, and then you queue up for the next game. So we need a way to deal with that awkwardness and actually feel safer in it and dive in. So the next time that you feel awkward, and this is going to be the compass, don't pay attention to what people are saying or anything like that. Doesn't matter what they say. The thing to pay attention to is do you feel awkward?

Do you not know what to say in this conversation? Because that's something that you can absolutely understand. Ah, man confused, man not know what to do. Friend is depressed. Here, man, have beer. Beer will help. Let us go play video game. Do you want to play with my dog?

Man play with dog, man feel better. So when you don't know what to do, we're going to teach you a couple of things to say. It's going to be so easy. Number one, help me understand that. Anytime a man comes to you and says something that makes you feel awkward or you think they're trying to say something, you can just say, help me understand that. Second thing you can say is, can you tell me more? That's it.

That's all we need to do. It's actually not that hard. It's hard until you know how to do it. And we're not taught these things. It doesn't make us stupid. And it's frustrating for women because we're not taught this stuff, right? So we just know one place to go for emotional support. That's not their fault.

They're getting overwhelmed by it. So we need to learn how to do this ourselves because we are men and we have to solve our own problems, right? We can't rely on other people for help? So if you're feeling awkward, just ask people, hey, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Can you help me understand? Can you tell me more? Say more, bro. Preach, brother.

You know, he can do some of that stuff. But I don't know if that's going to move in the right direction. the first important thing that we need to learn is men. Stop compartmentalizing our relationships. Now, the second thing that we need to learn is how to turn anger into accountability. So a lot of what holds Ben back is that when we have problems in life, we get pissed about it. And if you look at toxic masculine spaces on the internet, which I don't agree that they're entirely toxic, what I mean is the spaces that other people label as toxic. What you will see is a lot of anger. Now, anger can be good.

in a lot of ways. It's not our fault that we actually feel very angry because we as men are socialized to experience only one emotion. There's only one thing we're allowed to do, which is be angry, right? And this is where people say, no, no, no. It's like, it's okay to cry. Like, people will say that, but then if you actually cry in front of other people, you will get punished. And let's not forget all of the other emotions because now we have a couple of movies out there where they're really manly men who are crying, right? But they're such heroes that it makes it so beautiful. Oh my God, he's crying. Oh, God.

I love him so much. But what about anxiety? Oh, shit, I don't know what to do. You're a bundle of nerves. You're having a panic attack. You're worried about your future. Do people tolerate that? Not at all.

And what about shame? Oh, yeah, I'm a piece of shit. I'm pathetic. I'm this. I'm that. Like, I don't know if I'm ever going to amount to anything in life. Do people be like, oh, my God, that must be so hard for you. And like, you, like, no, they're usually like, no.

Man can do. Go gym. Have beer. This will fix problem. Man, no, this is difficult. Right? So it's not just women. It's we don't know how to deal with this stuff.

And the number one problem with anger is that it absolves us of accountability. See, any time you look at angry men, there is usually not any accountability that goes with it. Once again, let us look at the scientific literature. I was angry, like I was devastated that I lost her, the partner. But it's because she broke up the family unit. Like a lot of guys get angry, obviously. And I was angry just because she broke up the family unit. You know, I couldn't get to see my daughter as much as I wanted to.

So this is a very common experience for men, where we will sort of get really upset at the women in our lives or other people for doing us wrong, right? How dare she take her daughter away from me or my daughter away from me? Oh my God, we get so angry. And then if you go to an online forum, people will say, yeah, like, oh, man, like all women are bitches and they'll say things like that, right? And I think it's understandable to be angry. But there are a couple of problems with this. In this case, so herein, Mick downplayed the loss of his partner in assigning her blame for his changed family access. Mick's lack of introspection for his culpability in the shift hinted at male entitlement and patriarchy were in grievances for losing control of his family drew anger rather than accountability.

Now, this is where I don't want to get triggered by the whole patriarchy thing, but one thing that I will say from a neuroscience perspective. Generally speaking, when we get angry at things, we do not take accountability. So, forget about the patriarchy triggering words. Let's just understand this, right? When someone gets angry at you for something, do they accept the blame that they had? Now, let's think very dispassionately. Generally speaking, when two people break up, is it usually one person's fault? Usually it takes two to tango, it takes two to break up.

The problem with anger, from a neuroscience perspective, is that anger makes our thinking black in white. Right? So anytime we feel angry, what literally happens is all of our physical peripheral vision collapses down to 30 degrees. And the same thing happens to us cognitively. We can only see this one thing. And if you look at the real world, very few things in the real world are black or white. Very few things are 100% this person's fault. The challenge is, it's not that the woman in some way is not to blame, because it takes two to make a relationship. The problem is that when you are angry, it is very difficult for you to take accountability for your actions. So literally, when pissed off men come into my office, to do psychotherapy, we will start by decompressing the anger.

Once we decompress the anger, then we can appropriately assign blame. We can say, this is what she did wrong. What did you do wrong? And this is the beautiful thing about doing that. See, if we blame the other person 100% for the problem, then we can't actually control things, right? Because this isn't in our hands. There's nothing that I did wrong. What this means is that I am a victim to whatever person I have a relationship with. They have all the power because they're fully accountable. And so literally what I've seen in patterns of men is that the more angry they get, the less accountability they take. The less accountability they take, the less they change. The less they change, the more they repeat the pattern. If you play a video game

and you blame your teammates and you say, oh my God, all my teammates suck, you will literally stay stuck at that MMR because you're not actually improving at life. And anger disables our ability to improve. So take a step back. Don't let anger absolve you of accountability. Do you have a right to be angry? Absolutely. Did your partner do something wrong? 100%. But if you assume that they did everything wrong and you did everything right, there is a 0% chance of improvement for you. So you need to take more accountability and it will be easier to do that once you decompress it. anger. We have a lot of other videos on the channel. We have different kinds of meditation techniques and stuff like that through Dr. Kay's guide where we talk about anger and meditation.

There's all kinds of stuff you can do to decompress your anger. But recognize that as long as you're seeing black and white and it's 100% the other person's fault, your life will never improve unless you get lucky. Now we move on to the third thing, which is that we need to stop transforming and start accepting. So if you look at the way that men deal with problems, we all have this dream to transform into a different man for whom the problems are easier, right? So if I get bullied in the classroom, I'm going to get swole and then I can beat them up. So I need to change into someone else to make this work better. If I feel ashamed of myself because I'm not making enough money, I need to transform, right?

This is like Voltron or whatever, where it's like Power Rangers or whatever transform Pokemon crap, You want to pick, anime, whatever. It's why we all love that stuff, right? It's all these different transformations from Bruce Wayne into Batman. All speak to the subconscious dream of the man, which is that I can magically turn into whatever the world needs for me. In my day life, I am a mild-mannered Clark Kent. But when the world needs me, I will transform into the Superman.

And all these superheroes have alter egos that are like completely normal people. This is what we all want. And the world wants this of us too. And this absolutely needs to stop. Because when someone creates a problem for you, if you have to transform in order to fix that problem, who is it that controls what you become? You lose all control over your life.

Because once this problem arises, I need to turn into this. And once this problem rises, I need to turn into this. And once this problem arises, oh, now my girlfriend is unhappy that I don't make enough money. Now I need to work extra shift. Oh, this person, I feel this person makes fun of me when I go to the beach. This means that I can't go to the beach anymore until I work out and I get a six-pack, which means that you're denying yourself the beach for the rest of your life, right? Because you don't have a six-pack yet.

You think you're just going to get one now because this person made fun of you. It doesn't work like that. So one of the craziest things, this is such a hard skill to learn for men, is stop trying to transform and start accepting. Now, this may seem very, very contrary to what you want to do. Because the whole point is that, oh, but I want to have a six-pack, Dr. K? Like, okay, fine, I get that. But as long as you are letting other people dictate the person that you want to become,

you will never find the sustained motivation to actually do it. Unless you have a ton of resentment, in which case you can sometimes do it. But generally speaking, it's not very good. Instead, what we really want to do is learn to accept, right? This person is an asshole. So be it. Am I going to let this person dictate my life? Am I going to stop going to the beach?

This person is just going to make fun of me? That's going to happen sometimes. It do be like that. sometimes, right? So the moment that you accept, and that's why that phrase is so powerful, now these external circumstances stop controlling you. And even though you may not be able to transform, and I know it feels really bad, because we want to become all those beautiful things, right? We want to be Superman, we want to be Batman, we want to be Voltron, we want all that crap. But in wanting to be all that crap, how much have you actually moved forward? Because the stupid thing is that the

Neuroscience and psychology of it is that wanting to be something else out of a dream does not create sustained motivation. It is strength. It is confidence. It is groundedness. These are the things that lead to positive change over time. It is discipline. And that starts with not letting other people dictate your actions. So be it.

If this person wants to bully me, so be it. I'm still going to go to the gym and I'm going to work on myself. When you start taking control of your life, instead of letting your life take control of you, that is what it will actually get you to the gym. I'm going to go to the beach. I'm not going to let this person control. Now I'm in control. And when I'm in control, I say I'm going to go to the gym, which means I'm going to go to the gym. So if you look at it from a evidence-based perspective, we know that there's a new kind of

therapy called acceptance and commitment therapy. And acceptance and commitment therapy is all based around the idea that we can't change the world outside of us. All we can do is accept it. And this is a evidence-based therapy that helps people do things like overcome addictions. Because when you accept, right, and we see this in. an alcoholic's anonymous, hi, my name is Alok and I'm an alcoholic. There is an immense psychological and neuroscientific value to accepting instead of transforming. And the beautiful thing is when we give up

transformation, at least in the short term, we stop letting our circumstances dictate who we become. So I know it sounds crazy. Men are getting screwed. And as usual, we are responsible because ain't no one going to help us with this crap. So we are going to come together and we are going to help each other, right? You're not in this alone. I'm here. The HG community is here. There's a lot of other people who are here to help you. Thankfully, there are also a lot of women out there who are there to help us. We have those women in our community. And at the same time, there are a couple of things that we are never taught how to do. We end up compartmentalizing relationships. We don't know how to form connections. We end up channeling anger instead of accountability, which keeps us stuck in the same fucking cycle over and over

and over again, and we all have these dreams to transform into the perfect man. And those dreams are triggered by our circumstances, and when we fall victim to them, we open ourselves up to other people dictating who we become. We lose control over our lives. So start accepting, start taking accountability, and start talking to other men.