Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Raising Boys as Sensitive and Intuitive Humans with Justin Baldoni

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

If you are raising a man, identify as a man or love a man this episode will mean the world to you! I know it means the world to me as a mom of 3 boys and a wife of one man.  In today’s Language of Love Conversation, actor, director, author, and father Justin Baldoni unpacks how this question motivated him to write his recent book, Boys Will Be Human. Justin shares the insights and clarity he wishes he had been given as a young man. We connect over our experiences as parents as we struggle through trying to   help our own children become the people they’re destined to be.  In this conversation, we break down: How social pressure and our own unconscious conditioning can act as a barrier to helping our boys grow into healthy men  Tips for teaching boys to move through feelings rather than ignore or hide them  How to tackle bullies and bystanders who squelch our boys’ creativity and self expression  The unexpected effects Porn has on developing brains and how the idea of sexual consent plays out in boys’ sex education.  Check out Justin’s podcast, Man Enough, and be sure to read his book, Boys Will Be Human, with your kiddos!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm sex, love, and relationship therapist, Dr. Laura Berman. And for the past 30 years, I've been helping people just like you learn to love and be loved better. Here on the Language of Love Conversations, I'm talking to some of the world's most influential and revolutionary experts, thought leaders, spiritual teachers, and celebrities about love, sex, and relationships from a mind, body, and spirit perspective. and that way my goal is to awaken your mind body and soul it's time to become fluent in the language of life justin baldoni he's an american actor a filmmaker he's best known for portraying rafael

solano on the show jane the virgin and he's also directed several films including five feet apart and clouds. He is the author of two books, Man Enough, which I interviewed him about a while back when that book came out. And I remember at the time I said, Justin, you need to write a book for boys. And he's like, well, as a matter of fact, I'm doing that right now. So this conversation is all about Justin's newest book called Boys Will Be Human. Get it? Instead of boys will be Boys, Boys Will Be Human. It's a book, a love letter really, written almost like he's the big brother or the older, wiser friend that every man wishes he had as a boy and every boy doesn't know they need. And he covers everything from what bravery really is, body image, porn, bullying,

being in touch with your feelings we get into it all in this conversation on the language of love I'm so excited to share it with you so Justin I'm really excited about your newest book and I understand that it even hit the New York Times bestseller list right it did it really did I think we spent three weeks there and that's exciting was not expecting that what a sweet if that was yeah that's a real testament to how needed this is boys will be human and i want to talk to you about because i remember when i interviewed you for your first book and i said you need to write a book for kids and you said well as a matter of fact i was writing it as we were as we were talking i was writing it yeah yeah and i know you're a dad to a little girl

and a little boy, but I could imagine, you know, that you were writing this book thinking about yourself back then. Cause I know you say it's sort of for the boys, 11 years old and up kind of those pre-puberty and puberty years that there's so little guidance for, but also I'm sure you were thinking about your son, right? Like what book you would want him to have in his hands. not that he doesn't have the book in person and you 24 seven, but what kind of book you would want him to read? Was that in your mind? It was, but honestly, more than my son was really myself. It was thinking about, God, what could I have had? What book could I have had in my hands that would have changed my development and helped me? And so of course I was thinking

about my son. But at the same time, like, I don't know, five, six years from now, there might be different challenges that are the same, but they've evolved. And there might be a part two that I'll need to think about. But it was really a deeper inner child healing. What do I wish? Who is the friend, the mentor, the big brother that I just longed for that I wish I would have had? And that's really where the book came from. And then of course, the byproduct of it is like, yeah, I'm going to have something to be able to give him when he's 11 years old. Well, you were, we're going to talk about some of this because you were really honest. You were like, your voice was like a big brother and you were really

honest and open about a lot of your own struggles. But yeah, I think you can absolutely give this book to you. I mean, I gave my books to my sons, but they weren't about adolescence. It was like once they were ready to be sexual. In fact, they've asked me for copies over the years for their friends yeah i remember you told me that i remember my books are about like how to have sex and how to give someone pleasure it's not about something as integral as your your relationship with your own masculinity right and you say you start well your books are more of your books are kind of a part two yeah i would think you have to start somewhere yeah but you get into sex we're going to talk about that because you actually i was impressed you did a pretty good job but you

Coming from the master, I appreciate that. I know, right? But you start by saying that we really need to undefine what masculinity is. So can you just talk about what you mean by that? Yeah, I think growing up, masculinity looks different and similar for everybody. At the end of the day, we are all put in a box and we are asked to perform our masculinity within the constructs of this box. and anything that is outside of said box is then deemed unmasculine or different or odd or queer or all of the various things that we label when they don't fit into the idea of what we've been

told a man should look like and that's very harmful especially to young boys because it's not just men that are holding up these standards and boys that are holding up these standards it's also girls and women who are then taught to hold up these same standards because we're all raised in the same system and boys want to be accepted and liked by other boys and they also if they are at that age if they know their sexuality and if they're of course heterosexual they also want to impress and be liked by girls and and there is a performance aspect to what it is to be a boy and a man that is just rarely talked about we learn from other boys monkey see monkey do and oftentimes our fathers put these boxes on us if we have fathers or male figures in our lives

And if you don't have that, then you have movies or, or in magazines and all the various other things I'm sure we'll get into. And if you don't even have that, then you have the mothers who are trying to raise these young boys to become men. And all she knows is, is what the world tells her a man should be and is doing her best. So, so at the end of the day, everybody has an opinion and an idea of what a man should be. And we rarely reach into the hearts of our young boys and ask them who they feel like

they are. Or even what they feel, right? You talk a lot about. yeah i mean we're not yeah what of course but even like well what do you feel a boy is forget about what your friends say what does it mean to be a boy to you and i just believe we have to undefine and unlearn so much of this stuff to make room for any boy who calls himself a boy to just be allowed to be a boy because it's a really sweet time and it's also a very confusing and painful time in a young boy's life but those things end up becoming the drivers of our unconscious and subconscious

thoughts as we get older. And so who we are at 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old and the experiences that shape us both interpersonal and with friends and sexually with members of the opposite sex shape and define us for the rest of our lives. And nobody is talking to young boys. I was like, where are the books? Where are the books for young boys that remind them that who they are as they are is enough. Where are the books that teach them about porn and sex before their friends give it to them or before they get the cell phone? Exactly. Before they learn all the things that they shouldn't learn. And there's nothing out there. It's almost like we've abandoned our boys because boys will be boys, which has become an excuse. So that's really what this

is about. It's about undefining and making room for the humanity to live in our boys before it's beaten and policed out of them by other boys. Yeah. And by society. And that's why it's not Boys Will Be Boys, Boys Will Be Human, the title of your book. So I want to unpack this a little bit because I think it's so important. One of the things that I thought you did really well was to explain what is essentially generational conditioning and even generational trauma, right? You alluded to this in what you were just saying, but you talk about how your dad was once a boy, right? And had a dad. And that's how he learned to be a man. And you also sort of are speaking in a kid's terms or like a big brother would about how our parents are just

doing the best they can, right? And they're parenting us the way they were parented or the way they wish they were parented or the way they're trying to protect us. They're trying to teach us, but there is basically as misinformed as we are. And I just wanted to give you a shout out for that because I thought you did a really good job of planting the seed of what is essentially generational trauma, right? Yeah. Thank you. You're welcome. I also think, speaking to what you were describing just now, you talk in the book, because as I said, you share a lot of your own story. I thought this was a really powerful example and also a real demonstration of how insidious this kind of

pressure is. You were saying, I think it was when you got to high school, right? Yes. Because in middle school, you were really involved in theater and you're kind of seeds of that passion of what would later become a big part of your career, your acting career, and even production career was sort of starting there. But when you got to high school, no one even needed to say to you, oh, you don't want to do theater. That's for losers or for whatever, for lamos or for girls or whatever. No one even said anything to you. You just were so like all boys, really, unless they are intervened with, right? You were so desperate to fit in and to not be bullied or teased that you just abandoned the theater because you knew the jocks got the respect in the school. So you

went that direction, right? Exactly. So I thought that was really important because it's not just that boys are succumbing to the teasing and the overt pressure, but they preemptively act in ways to avoid the disapproval or the social rejection. Yeah. I mean, we don't want to be hurt. We don't want to be outcast. We want to be liked and accepted. And I just have so much respect, actually looking back and thinking about all the kids and all the boys that maybe did have athletic ability but chose the thing they loved over the popular thing like that so there were a lot of people that did that that i just think are so damn brave and you know i hope i can raise kids that will do the same thing that will just know themselves so ferociously that they choose what

they love over the fear yeah and but look high school and middle school it's just a microcosm of of every industry and everything I mean it's all the same stuff yeah and on steroids yeah but I mean but well I mean at least the industry I'm in it's very similar I find myself oftentimes I often find myself like making decisions and being like oh I made that decision because I wish I could have made that choice in high school or I made a joke the other day like yeah my career is just me like replaying out my high school experience and trying to be liked and accepted and get nominated oh my gosh Hollywood is so like that it's just all the same but yeah but we make decisions so often out of out of fear instead of out of love and then we look back and wonder

why we're not happy or what's missing and it starts so young so the boys don't have to say like oh don't do theater it's just where's the attention you know and now the new version of it is where are the likes where are the comments where the follows that's where we go like moths to a flame yeah we all go boys and girls you have a whole chapter on coolness right that'd be cool right and one of the things that you wrote about which i think really hit me and i thought it was really a beautiful way of describing it is that you kind of lay out that in many ways numbness is the path to coolness right because you can't talk about your feelings chill being chill being chill right it's better to be and you're saying look it's better to be real than chill right and

to be chill you have to basically numb out squelch your feelings repress them not show them and in many ways not feel them i mean yeah it's like look at who we gravitate to we gravitate to like really really happy and positive people and we gravitate to and funny people and like life of the parties and we gravitate to like the cool chill you know back in the day it was like the marlboro man or yeah no it's like the guys are like they're not they're not phased they're not phased by anything and if you think about it both of those are extremes you know we're doing this podcast the day after a very well-known and beloved dancer performer I was going to ask you about which which you know he's been on my heart a lot as he has been in the whole community and

and it's hitting people in such a profound way because here was this man who was just known for like exuding love and joy and happiness and dancing and making video dance videos with his kids. And even admittedly, I've looked at him and his family and been like, oh my God, he's got so much joy. He's like Locke, he's found that part of himself. And then when you find out someone like that takes their life, you're like, wait, what's real and what's not? And too much of anything that in the Baha'i faith, Baha'u'llah tells us that anything carried to an extreme in these terms, he says, can prove to be a source of evil, which is really translated to anything in the extreme is not healthy for you and there is no version where you're just always

happy and always joyful all the time or you're always chill and unbothered because all of those feelings which are human have to go somewhere it's like you think about a river and a dam and like the intricacies of that whole system all we see is like oh there's a big lake there but there's there's hundreds of millions of square feet of pipes that lead to other places and And there's pressure gauges that you're always monitoring to make sure that the pressure doesn't build up and overflow or the dam doesn't break and there's an outlet somewhere. And we're designed the same way, but we don't realize that because we're told we have to be one thing or another.

And when you're young and you're in middle school, it's like, yeah, you want to be chill. The chill guy is the one that has the friends, that gets the girl, all of those things. It's the chill guy. But what does chill even really mean? It just means that you've learned how to numb yourself so that you're not bothered by anything. But at some point, where does it go? Just like someone who's always happy. I love that you're always happy.

Robin Williams was always happy. Like these beloved performers were always happy, but where's your outlet? Where do you go to be, to be as my old therapist would say, your horrible rotten self, that part of you that you're embarrassed by, the part of you that was teased in school or that you're processing trauma from your childhood, where does your anger go? And it has to go somewhere. I had Dr. Gabor Mate on my show and he talked about depressed, like you're literally depressing your feelings. It's literally what it is.

Like the word comes from the depression of your feelings into your body. And so I just want young kids to know, especially young boys, that being human is allowing yourself to feel everything. It's the joy and the pain. When I go make a movie, when I'm directing a scene, I'm always looking for how a scene can be two things at once. Yeah. Because almost everything is multiple things at once. Everything is. I'm coming to you today, having this podcast with you, and there is a work thing in the back of my head and my heart that I have a little anxiety over. But I'm acknowledging that, but I'm bringing this into the conversation and I'm not repressing it to the point where I can't

feel it anymore because otherwise it's going to come out on my wife someday in like three days. Or if my kid says the wrong thing and I'm like, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, oh, wait a second. That wasn't me. I'm so sorry. Daddy's got to go work on that. I got to get that out. And so what do you do to get it out? Do you do somatic work or what do you do to move those emotions? I actually talk about this in the book and I have a few gut checks that are, it's like kind of somatic practice 101, if you will, for these kids. Yeah. I want you to make a workbook for them to go with your book and have a bunch of these exercises. Yeah. I've thought about it. You know, that was the, that was the reason why you had so

many of these gut checks in here because I was like, okay, it's one thing to read. It's another thing to like, okay, let's try this. Or, you know, the simplest way for me is I have to acknowledge, okay, something feels off. That's the first step. We've been trained at such a young age to almost not have an intuition anymore about how we feel because we don't have we don't have a language we don't know what it is we're feeling where it lives in our body we don't know any of those things because we we've numbed ourselves we're not allowed to feel those things because those things are perceived as weakness and only girls have those things right right and what's the worst thing the worst thing you can be called when you're a young boy is a girl other than cool and

happy and chill happy cool you can be angry if you're angry like you know so it's finding a it's finding a way to acknowledge that something feels off like oh i'm in a bad mood it's not about just covering up the bad mood or or what i heard growing up is like snap out of it like get over it dude what does that mean how does one do that yeah there's no roadmap and you think about all these things that we were told growing up you know like oh no wonder that we're all so fucked up yeah like in my case don't be so sensitive oh yeah well especially especially for a young boy it's even worse what about boys who are highly sensitive and like me i'm a highly sensitive emotional man yeah and yet that's the most unmasculine thing i can be how do i rectify

that within myself how do i have empathy and yet like squash it so that it doesn't actually affect the way that i do business or work or like make emotional or unemotional decisions and so the first step is okay oh something is off what am i am i upset am i angry why i'm short i'm being short with this person why am i annoyed what is it there might not be something there so then the next step is to start to breathe and you take a take a deep breath and you're like oh wait i feel tight i feel tight in my chest okay so you start to breathe into your chest and then i might what am i feeling in there what does the tightness actually represent for me and you start to breathe and you breathe into it you slow down and then you allow your mind to then do some of the work

for you which is like okay what what's coming up for me is there an image that i'm feeling in my chest when i'm breathing and i feel that tightness is there another feeling behind the feeling am i feeling frustration okay what am i frustrated about oh this thing came to mind that happened earlier in the day and then i'm breathing into that again and maybe it moves into my stomach so i breathe into my stomach and i'm like oh i'm even shorter of breath what people don't realize is it gets worse before it gets better so it's like oh okay because your body is trying to tell you that you have to feel the thing that you buried down so let me breathe into that and like oh i'm feeling angry oh there's anger underneath that feeling oh and then for me

i've gotten to the place where i'm now able to allow myself like you know as an example oh the anger is there and i want to raise my hands and i want to go and i want to scream move it and then it just will start to if you do the work enough to come out of you and it doesn't have to come out in the moment with my wife or with my daughter or with another person or in a business meeting but it does have to come out yeah one way or another it will one way or another it's got so i i suggest taking a few moments going into your room if you're a kid putting a pillow over your mouth and like screaming into the pillow hitting like hitting the pillow if whatever it is that needs to come out it's got to come out eventually and this again this is somatic 101 yeah no but it

But it starts with, it starts with breath for me and going into whatever that is. And I'm not a master at this by any means. And I'm just on the journey, but I'm so grateful that the last two years has really opened me up to a lot of this. Cause if I had this when I was 11, 12, if my parents had this as a tool, if honestly, most of my friends had this as a tool, I know very few people who do this work like this and it's life-changing and it's important. And it doesn't take very long.

I mean, I do the same thing. And it's been the key to my healing, but also my survival, certainly over the past couple of years. And people are, you know, I think part of it is that we aren't trained to be in touch with how we're feeling at all. And we don't have words or language, but also we're scared shitless because the fear is that if I open up that Pandora's box, like it's never going to end. There's no bottom to that ocean. And I always say, like, there may not be a bottom to the ocean, but there are so many sandbars. and each time it doesn't take that long 10 to 15 minutes maybe at most to really like feel what you're feeling if you move your thinking brain a little bit out of the way and let your body move

it and then you kind of hit a sandbar like you hit solid ground and chill on the sandbar for a second yeah you just stay on the sandbar or you go about your day and maybe there's another sandbar later i had a batting for years when my kids were small and i had all i had all three boys we had a bat station because and so we had this big plastic baseball bat and these big round pillows because so often even when they would be fighting with each other or even when they were acting out i would like say okay do you need the bat station they were okay with crying not in public but at home but sometimes they had just this huge anger to move and they would move it out on each other right or just this huge energy to move and so of course i use the bad station as

much i love that idea i love that idea of the bad station yeah i think that's great i think it's also i think it's also important for the parents to show their kids how it's done yeah which is something that we're working on is like when i'm frustrated i want my son to be able to see how i move it through yeah so that he can then do it but what i found is that naturally they do it anyways i mean that is what a tantrum is yeah like that's all it is it's the tantrum is them trying to process something that happened earlier in the day these micro traumas that happen and it's got to come out of them and it comes out of them in the most mundane silly thing because the peas touched the carrots or because it's the wrong spoon and then it's like the world is ending

and once you start to understand your own body and how your emotions are trapped you start to go like oh i get it right and instead of ignoring them or punishing them or sending them to their room to really honor the feelings you might not be able to do that in that moment because you haven't given yourself the time i think that a lot of adults are triggered by their children's temper tantrums and and things because they never were allowed to have that was certainly my case growing up. I mean, and that's how I learned to repress them because I threw major tantrums and I would be either teased. I remember my mother, I shouldn't laugh. I mean, it's just my mother dancing around with my sister, my older sister saying, we're going to send you

to a mental institution while I was on the floor throwing a temper tantrum or would laugh at me or tease me or just leave the room. Right. And in fact, the common wisdom for kids having temper tantrums is just like which i do not think is wise or should be common is just to leave them yeah which is the worst thing you could ever do abandon them it's at that moment that they desperately need connection because really what really what it is is they need to feel safe yeah and seen yeah and empathized with yeah yeah i highly recommend people read um the myth of normal, which is Dr. Gabor's. Yes. I interviewed him. His interview's coming out, I think in a couple of weeks from this interview. Ours just came out on this week, actually. Yeah. I can't

stop quoting him and talking about him. And I told him, even though you said a million times in that book that parents shouldn't feel guilty, I feel fucking guilty because I can see all the ways, even despite all of my best efforts, but it's not, you know, it's society. It's the way were conditioned. As most of you know, for the past several years, I've been on a pretty intense grief journey and it's been a path of healing. I've shared lots of that healing with you and lots of the healing resources that I found. And I am so thrilled to announce that I am doing my first ever retreat for grieving mamas. So if you or someone you love is a mama who has lost a child in any way, at any stage, at any age,

I would love for you to come join me at 1440 Multiversity in the Redwoods near Santa Cruz, California for four amazing days of beautiful, uplifting community and healing. We've got David Kessler. We've got Paul Selig. We've got Catherine Woodward Thomas.

We've got me. We've got body work. We've got organic food, beautiful rooms. Go to 1440.org. Check it out. It's right there on the homepage. I really hope you can join us. When you were talking in your chapter about bravery, right, it's really about that we think

the wrong things are brave. And one of the things that we think is brave is putting up with things and not feeling them and not apologizing because that's a show of weakness. And we have all these stories about bravery that are shown to us, modeled for us, and conditioned into us. And to me, that's like a big part that and wanting to be cool are a big part of what leads to that kind of feeling repression. I mean, with my kids, I was constantly I did my best and I think I did a pretty good job of helping them be in touch with their feelings and feel accepted and feel loved and feel seen. But it is not enough. I mean, I think the parents are a huge part of it, but then they would spend all day every day in school yeah being reprogrammed and being programmed

and wanting desperately to fit in and that pressure especially at certain points in their life like the age group you're speaking to in your book starting at around age 11 is so important to them yeah you know i know we went very deep the last time we talked on your show and you know we talked about your son who you lost and all of that and you know i think about those kids yeah you know kids like your son and god if they just only knew i mean you did everything you could as a parent but it can't come from just the parents no it can't i mean he would say to me look i know mom you don't have to i know adults love me i know when i get older i'm gonna be fine but it's a long time until then it's even a long time till I get out of this high school and or any high school

and he was just had the shit bullied out of him and was so desperate to fit in and found this group of kids that would accept him but they were the kids that were numbing out with drugs and they explicitly told him because he would talk to me about it they will not hang out with me unless I do drugs too. Otherwise they think I'm a narc or I'm not cool. Like he would beg me to, and God bless him for like wanting my permission, but he would beg me to say it was okay to smoke pot so that he could hang out with these kids. And I remember really wanting to say yes, because his pain was so palpable. And I said to him, I, there's a part of me that really wants to say, okay, but I can't, as your mother bring myself to do that so that you can hang out with these

asses. I can't do that. I don't want to do that. And we got to find you different friends, right? We got to find you different outlets. We got to find you different connections. And then, of course, COVID hit and that wasn't possible. But that's why he ordered those drugs when that drug dealer reached out to him because he was trying to impress those friends. And he was trying to impress a girl that he had met online that was really into drugs. And then he thought, okay, this is here. I'll try it. See what happens. He probably was planning on calling his friends or FaceTime his friends, you know, I did some, you know, whatever. And it killed him because it was fentanyl, but that's a very, and this was a kid who knew about his emotions and knew how to

process them and knew everything you're talking about. But my big regret, and this is what I say to parents. I think the one thing, I mean, they're probably there. I could name a million things I could have done differently and would have, could have, should have, like any parent in my situation would do from the time he was born. But the one thing I wish I had done really is, I remember there was this counselor he was working with, and I'll never forget it, who said, you know, when a kid is being bullied, every single day they are walking into a war zone. They can come home, they can be peaceful, they can be safe, but then the next day they're going back in. And I think, And he was beginning his junior year.

And this therapist said, I think you should consider taking him out and homeschooling him. And I was like, I don't know. There was a part of me that wanted to do it. But then when my husband and I talked about it, we were like, no, that'll affect his college applications. You know, what will it look like? We just and then COVID hit and we thought, OK, that's we don't have to worry about that for a while, like at least through the end of the year. And then, of course, he died. But I wish I wish I had. And when parents have said to me, oh, my daughter really hates her school, but I don't want to take her out. I'm like, take her out. Take her out. Don't worry. Like, who gives a fuck about college if your kid doesn't live till then? Right.

but it really was the insidiousness of the boys at his school and the whole community and the ways in which and i know you talk about this when you talk about bullying and how hurt people hurt people but it was really like there were kids that were really nice but they were too scared just like you alluded to when you were talking about male privilege in your book and white privilege and you did that in as gentle a way as possible which i really appreciate because, you know, it doesn't serve to this whole, my boys went to a very progressive school and like to the point where my youngest will say every year, oh no, it's, it's women's history month. And I'll say, you know, at first I said, well, why is that a bad thing? Cause I'm going to be

bashed all month, you know? And I'm like, that's really messed up. But anyway, no, but one of the things you talked about was this moment where you had this friend who was a person of color and someone said some derogatory term and you looked at him to kind of get a cue from him. And then you didn't say anything, right? Because he seemed fine. And a lot of kids won't even look at the kid to get a cue. And obviously, you went on to say it wasn't his job to let me know he wasn't fine. I should have said something either way. But you also were alluding to this idea of even if the kid did or didn't say something, even if you see something, there were kids that wanted to stand up for my son or even wanted to hang out with him, but wouldn't because then they are the

target of the bully. And I think that is so, it's all about, like, I feel like it wasn't my sons that need to read your book. It's all the other sons in the school, all the other boys in the school that need to read your book. Because my kids get it, but they are living in a world that doesn't yeah you're living in a war zone your body's going to be absorbing it and feeling it so when like when you said that i remember that's what it felt like for me yeah so it felt like like the anxiety was so strong yeah like even on the ride to school it was like oh god it was i was just so miserable and i think a lot of the anger that i have even with my own parents was like they didn't take me out they didn't and it's not their fault either because they had lives and

they were doing the best that they could and I hope you can release that regret I know you're working on it I'm sure you have I am and he was also a kid that was bullied at every school like I also knew that the only way because he was so precocious he was the kind of kid that grown-ups got in a split second and his teachers adored him and totally you know he was the one that got the jokes yeah but the other kids could not relate they just couldn't relate and he was always that way from the time he was born. And so I just figured, OK, like better to be with the devil. We know we'll just get through this and then he'll be fine in college and we'll support him as much as we can and we'll find him friends outside of school. And and then after reading

Gabor Mate's book, I'm like, shit, he wouldn't have even been as affected by the bullying if he had been better connected to us. But so, yeah, there's lots of room for regret. But I think Yeah. The main thing is for parents listening is to teach your boys what the kinds of things we're talking about, read the book, help change the culture, right? Like, so this isn't just for one individual boy. This is for boys. Laura, it's like, what if, imagine some of these other boys who were nice to your son, as an example, had read this book and stood up for your son, right? that's it's not even so much about the bullies it's about all of the bystanders yep because and this is you know when you look at the work of tony porter and ted bunch at a call to men it's

like these things can't happen if it weren't for the good men yeah who stood by who weren't brave enough to say something like so this is the idea of like okay if we were really good men then this stuff wouldn't exist this is where this definition of bravery has to change and we have to really redefine that because had there been a few boys who had had the courage to stand up to these asshole kids who really are just like we all know you're a doctor like if we were to just do a go in and do like a case study of like four or five of these kids yeah we know what we know what their households would look like no we would talk about that my kids knew that yeah but it's the other parents don't care about them they're on their own half the time they're too busy they come from

broken homes like everybody's got the trauma being bullied themselves they're being bullied they feel like shit and then all and but that is really essentially like that's patriarchy 101 yeah how can i numb my pain by exerting power and dominance over somebody who is physically less or weak or distract from some of my flaws by focusing my perceived exactly on something else or somebody else so all i have to say like that that is very much like it's not even about the bullies it's about the other kids because it's if the other kids had the strength then who knows who knows what would have happened and i always believe that most of the kids that follow bullies would love to not oh my gosh absolutely they're doing it it's and it's like being a bully is the

most insecure position in a hierarchy of a school because at any given point in time you can be dethroned if you meet somebody who bullies you yeah right and then you have to always be exerting power and dominance and making somebody else feel less than to build yourself up and the more you do it the meaner you get and all it takes is all it takes is one person to come in who bullies you and you lose it all and then all your followers and then you have nothing but that is also again this like the microcosm of the macro it's like you can see this happening everywhere in the world yeah and it was interesting because after his death i've gotten so many emails and notes from his classmates telling me the all of these stories about how sweet he was and how thoughtful he was

and you know if there's anything i can do let me know and i'm like you know what you can do is say something speak up if you see a kid sitting alone or being mistreated tell the person not to do that. Go and sit with that person at lunch so that he doesn't have to go and sit with the coaches like my son did. Reach out, make a difference. And when I saw them at his funeral, these kids that I knew had rejected him and didn't invite him to their parties because the bully didn't want him there or because they would be teased or because he wasn't cool and didn't include him and stood by when he was being humiliated and mistreated, I could see their regret and their pain. And it really moved me because there were like 15 of these boys showed

up from his football team. And I had planned on just having the groundskeeper fill in the grave after everybody threw in a little bit of dirt. I didn't want to stay and fill it in or watch it filled in. But these boys decided that they were going to do it on their own. And they took the shovels from the caretaker and one by one, they filled in the entire grave and they would not leave until it was full. And they stood around and you could just feel the pain radiating off their very stoic faces as they don't show any real emotion on the surface. But you could see and feel the level of, because at that age, at any age, the death of a child, but at that age, the death of a peer changes your life. And so they knew, they knew the part they had. I knew

they knew it. They were making some sort of homage or restitution or care for him that they didn't give them in life life that will live in their bodies for their entire lives and so funny that made me tear up as you just were saying that because i can picture that and i know what it's like to be i know what it's like to be on that side yeah and i know what it's like to be your son and because what i did was different which was different than what your son did was i became the bully yeah to stop being bullied and that just left me feeling emptier yeah but i remember the first time that i had a therapy session where this came up out of the blue i was going into i was going into one of these feelings of this anxiety and this stuff and then

i was breathing into it and then boom i was 14 and i was in spanish class and there was a girl that like me wasn't very popular we were kind of both outsiders and she was kind of gearing up to like kind of go into the goth area which is really where kids go to feel accepted because it's like oh we're all misfits and people are mean to us let's just let's just like say screw it let's you know and she was kind of gearing up to go there and i was looking for my place because i was like i was an athlete but they didn't the athletes bullied me and i didn't really have any friends and i was alone at lunch and like there was like we had this connection and i remember sitting there and the homecoming court thing which is the most brutal thing that any high school could ever

do which is you have to like write down a list of kids who are like the best looking or the most popular to be nominated for homecoming court and it was just like all I wanted was for somebody to write my name so I wrote my own right and I and I write about that in the book because I think it's important like this feeling of like I just wanted somebody to see my name and think that I mattered or that i was enough but i remember her doing it and i think i wrote her name and she wrote mine i don't really remember but there was just like this connection that we had and she was cute but like there was also a part of me that i was like oh but she's not popular yeah right and i wanted to be popular and but we were friends and then she died in a car crash and i remember

just the guilt of the like because i wanted to i remember i wanted to ask her to homecoming because i didn't have anyone else to go with but i was too afraid to for all of the reasons like so it was easier just to not go and you know when you're that age you wonder like oh if i would have asked her would she be alive or could i have just made more of an effort to be close to her or be friends with her and her father came to our class he came to that spanish class and i remember uncontrollably sobbing like not being able to hold any of it back and not even knowing where it came from but just this like and hugging him and all of this came back to me in this in this session and i was just this little kid who who couldn't comprehend how this person is gone

yeah and like maybe i could have done something or maybe i oh i liked her why didn't i tell her enough i think i think i did have a crush on her but and it was like processing all of these things which have lived in me for 30 years 25 years yeah and we don't have an outlet for that we don't have a way to talk about it we like grief is a whole other and then later that year a girl killed herself and i remember like being like so confused of like what's happening and and nobody we couldn't talk to anybody about it i didn't even know how i was feeling the floodgates of my sadness and grief opened that day and i didn't know how to close them and nobody else in the class was crying like me it was like the beginning of me feeling like wait am i really sensitive is there something

wrong with me like in the beginning of bottling all of that up so i can only imagine what those boys feel yeah yeah of and not being and i guarantee you if one of them would have started crying all of them would have yeah no they were on the verge and i was holding both my deep compassion and appreciation for them and also rage contempt yeah like too little too late same way i felt about all the beautiful in the school newspaper and all you know people tend to kind of deify which he would have loved you know that's the one thing that got me through it is like he would have loved he got all the attention positive attention you know it's too bad that he had to leave to get it every time you finish a book you kind of wish you'd go deeper and

i do feel like there there should have been an extra chat i talk about it a little bit of the book but there should there should have been an extra chapter on grief yeah but i had already exceeded my word count by probably you said that at some point 35 000 i have so much more to say but they're already telling me this book is too long it was like literally they were like this is not like this is the longest middle grade book ever it's never it's never gonna sell if you keep going it's the same thing that's the same thing they said about man enough i'm like well you know what maybe maybe hire a writer for me next time because i just i word vomit all over this thing no every word is important but being able to process grief and understanding what

grief looks like and how non-linear it is similar to healing yeah and how it never really goes away you just learn to live with it because now especially so many young kids are dying mostly by suicide, many by drug overdoses and fentanyl and things like that. But the other result, which I do talk about in the book, is one of the things that happens far too often is young people kill themselves because of bullying, because of public humiliation. And we're talking 11-year-olds now. It's unbelievable. So there's a whole chapter even when we're talking about sex and naked pictures and that type of responsibility of what happens when these young girls send a boy a picture because they want to be liked or popular the boys share with everybody else then the girl

kills herself yeah i don't ever i'm so tired of reading these stories yeah you said i i had wrote this down dick pics 80 of gay and bisexual men 50 of women have gotten one and 90 of them never asked that was sort of in your discussion of consent i know you're talking about when someone sends you the consent is also to share about sharing or not sharing that image that someone does send you the big part of consent is that it also can be revoked at any time right that's the r and fries when you're talking about the analogy of consent and and if you send somebody a 14 year old girl sends her boyfriend a naked picture probably due to pressure let's be real like i don't know that i don't know many 14 year old girls who would send a picture by themselves

similar to like an unasked dick pic after the pressure she sends it she's giving consent for him to look at it but not everyone else but not everybody else it's a big difference yeah And when you break up, well, that consent can be and should be revoked. I remember talking to a group. It was part of an Oprah show I was doing. And I was talking to this group of 12 to 14-year-old girls. And I brought this up about sending nude pictures. And they were so eloquent about it.

And basically what they said is, look, we don't want to send the picture even. But if we don't, he's asking for this picture. And if we don't send it, then he's going to go on to the next girl who will. And that he keeps upping the ante, right? So he asked for a picture of me in my bra and then he wants one of my naked boobs or he wants one of my butt or whatever. And so there's this sense that if I don't do it, he's going to go on to someone who does, but I don't really want to do it.

That's not consent. I mean, you're consenting, but you're consenting under duress. And it's very tricky in the digital age to. Yes. qualify consent because technically the act of sending the picture is is electronically digitally consenting yes but we're not talking about all of the pressure that happens behind the actual sending of the picture which is why porn is so dangerous for yes you talk a lot about porn and i agree with you completely and you're even really honest about your own struggle

with the dopamine addiction and the distraction that porn created for you, you know, and how hard it was and how powerful it was when you finally sort of came out and shared the struggle with your friends. Yeah. I think that there should be a class taught to all 10, 11, 12 year olds, which is like, you know, instead of sex ed, it's like porn ed. Yeah. Like that's why the whole chapter in the book is all about what it does to your brain it's about that it's about understanding the chemicals in our brain and the neurochemistry and and what dopamine is and how it functions and what happens i thought that was a great description because and by the way this transfers into social media use which is why it's all connected in the book is it's the same these are the same

neural pathways and we're being manipulated by big tech which sounds like a conspiracy but it's not no it's no different it's literally no different as and i hate to use this analogy but it's no different than a drug dealer right right users like you're using it's the same thing like what are we called we're called users yeah we're users of the platform and they design it in a way where you get a big dopamine hit but you know what you didn't mention which is more recent science but this honestly did the got through to my boys when we had these conversations there were two parts of this conversation that I really found fascinating that I want to share with you. One was this happened when they were like, the youngest was maybe 14 or 15 and they knew, they know my work

and they knew I had a line of sexual aids and devices. And they said, Hey mom, can you give us a sex toy for guys? And I said, yeah, I can give you a sex toy, but you have to promise that you will use fantasy not porn yeah you told yeah you told me this in there yeah and they didn't even know what fantasy was i had to explain to them what it was to fantasize and the second thing which is something that's come out more recently is that it activates a different neural pathway when we see things on a screen in 2d than when we see things in 3d and what they are starting to uncover, and it's really preliminary because this is the first generation of young boys and girls, but it's mostly boys, let's admit it, that are watching and have access to so much porn,

right? This is the first group of kids that are coming up into adulthood. And what they are finding is that when they have their sexual initiation and extensive sexual focus like they do you know they're watching it all the time in 2d it is imprinting caught like neurocognitively their sexual arousal is starting to be tied to the neural processing of a 2d image so that when they finally get with a 3d person they can't stimulated yeah they can't perform and it's not just they used to think it was because oh because you need to be choked or you need to it's because of what you've been watching that's part of it but it's actually not just that that's it's really interesting and that actually probably ties into the study that i reference in the book which is

the part of the brain that associates the images that they're seeing as objects and not people yes i talk about that which really the reason i talk about it is because it links back to how much easier it is to sexually assault or take advantage of of someone who you have dehumanized already in your brain yeah because you're not seeing that person as a girl you're seeing that person as an object but tying it back to what you're saying is kind of the next piece which at some point i you know if i do write a part two i'll make sure i get into which is important and there and there i mean look and we know that there are many men who are addicted to porn that have that have these exact same issues generally it's like this it's the elevation of

needing a different type of porn a more extreme type of porn and then when you have a naked woman on your bed it's like not that exciting because you don't have all of this weird crazy shit that you've just been looking at in front of you but it does it does make a lot of sense the 3d versus the 2d so thank you for thank you for sharing that yeah and look again that porn chapter could have been the whole book and the sex chapter and that was what and that was hard because i had to cut a lot of stuff out and i was like god there's so much more here if anything it might be the most important part of the book because from the time you're 10 or 11 years old, you're just driven by those hormones. And if you don't have any place to go or anyone to talk to about it, you're going

to go to the places that you shouldn't. And then you're going to associate those places with shame because it becomes the forbidden fruit. It becomes taboo. You can't talk to anybody about it. You can talk to your boys a little bit about the things that you saw or what you're looking at, and that's kind of cool. But really, there is a shame. And then you mix the neurochemistry in with shame and here you are in this spiral of addiction and all you really want is connection yeah which is what everybody is experiencing i mean i had i think a doctor tell me at one point he thinks that 99 of men are in one way or another addicted to porn yeah it's a big issue it's a big issue and it's a silent it's just hidden and well it's also normalized yeah because it's like well

you're weird if you don't now it's almost like it's almost like how alcohol was it feels like 10 or 15 years ago like i just felt like it was really weird to not drink and now you look around and you're everyone's like oh yeah i'm sober and i don't drink anymore and it's super normal but when i was growing up i've never had it i've never had a drink i was the weirdest guy i was like why what's wrong with you and porn is very similar yeah and i went and spoke i went promoting the book i went and spoke at a university not too long ago and i asked 4 000 or 5 000 freshmen at one of the universities how many of them learned about sex from their parents and like one percent raised their hands and how many learned about sex from porn men and women girls and boys oh yeah

it's the world's worst sex education and yet that's where they learn from it but that's where they learn about sex and you did a good job of highlighting that that is not what real people look like. It's not what real sex looks like. It's not. But you're absolutely right, especially with as prevalent as it is now and with smartphones. You know, when my oldest was young, he's now 26, I could control it because we had the computer in the centralized location and it was pre-smartphones. And he'd either have to, someone would have to not be home or do it after we were asleep or he'd have to be at a friend's house who also, for the most part, had a centralized location but now with smartphones they have access 24 7 in their pockets and at school and

everywhere yeah and it's changing so much it's really dangerous it's dangerous for men it's dangerous for women my good friends at a call to men did a national survey and they found in their own research that 78 of high school senior men didn't know the definition of consent 78 oh my god you were talking about you know we know that one in four girls will be sexually assaulted and then you look at porn and you look at what it's doing look i mean just look at what it's doing to to the conversation around sex and look at what it look at like i was just thinking about this the other day there's so much more male nudity now frontal nudity in tv and movies and 90 of the actors are wearing prosthetic penises yeah to make their penises look bigger than they are

why they're not real and we're comparing they're comparing i remember my oldest he'll probably be mortified but he knows i talk about him i didn't know because i don't really watch i mean i would from time to time but i'm not a big consumer of porn but i didn't understand why he kept asking like talking about wanting to shave his you know because my kids talked to me about i can't i can't even believe they talked to you about that stuff which is yeah he wanted to shave his genitals and I was like, why? Do you want it to look bigger? You don't have a girl for it. He's like, no, that's what people do. I was like, that is not what they do until it suddenly dawned on me like, oh, that's what he's seeing in porn. It is. It is. I mean, look, even I remember

that's what I saw in porn and that's what all the girls did. Every girl that I was with as a teenager and then as a young adult, that's what everybody did. And you just emulate what you see. And then imagine being 10 or 11 years old before you're fully developed and you see these gigantic penises and then you compare yourself your whole life. And then you have girls weighing in on the conversation and then saying like, oh, well I needed this and this. And then suddenly you have all these men feeling like they're less than because they're looking at unrealistic standards. And the second you actually take the time to look at the national, like the data around this stuff, first of all, it's like, talk to most of the women that you know, you only

have so much space before you hit your cervix anyways like yeah it's it's it's it's not the size of the ship it's the motion of the ocean but again like again but these are things and then these young boys yeah i was one of them you grow up and you're like oh well like i need to hurt somebody like i need to be able to hurt somebody with my with my penis why we call it a tool or a hammer or like you know we smash it's like sex becomes this thing that isn't about intimacy or connection. It's about one performing just like masculinity. And it's about like almost wanting to make someone else hurt. Like, oh, well, if they don't have an orgasm, then I failed or this and this and this. Well, there's no talk about what sex actually is to these young boys,

which is why I take a very old fashioned approach in a book for 11 to 18 year olds and say, sex is about connection and it should be reserved. It should be reserved for relationships that have intimacy and connection and not just something that you use to numb or to, or to just play around with or have fun or distract. I love this line in the book. I wrote it down that your life will not be better or worse because of the size of your penis, but the size of your heart. I thought that was very sweet and true. I don't know one, one woman who has ever stayed with a man for the size of his penis but his penis is so large okay no way no it's like does he make me laugh does he make me happy and it's and and we forget about all of these things growing up even

like and even for men like sure i have buddies with huge penises they're still single yeah like they can't find that person yeah it has nothing to do in fact there was a study that showed that the bigger the penis the less of a good lover a man is ironically i think because they imagine that all they need is a big penis and they don't bother with all the other stuff and it's become the phallic symbol of domination and power yeah this idea that like oh you have that and suddenly you're the alpha the big reality that's not it at all so i wrote this for little justin who needed somebody to tell him this. Because it stays with all of us men into our lives. And how do I know? Because I just had 15 men over to my house the other night, had a male retreat, and all of

us went deep. And we all share the same issues. All of us share the same insecurities, but we've never had permission to talk about it. So this is just the beginning of, let's not wait for the world to assault our children. We need to be proactive and prepare them for what's going to come. Because in so many ways, I do believe that when a young boy sees porn for the first time or is exposed to those types of things, it carves the same neural pathways in our brain as actual sexual assault. And we have to, as parents, prepare them for what's to come. Explain to them that what they're seeing isn't real. Explain to them that it's a business. Explain to them that their bodies are perfect just the way that they are, the way God designed them. They don't have to be any of

those things that they see that there is so much enhancement that's done via surgeries and pills and all kinds of things to enable them to perform in those ways and at the end of the day it is a performance yeah so i don't know there's so much more to talk about than just porn but it is a huge part of it because i really want to i really want to grow up in a world where my children don't have to worry about being sexually assaulted being molested knowing who they are not feeling like they have to perform that my daughter doesn't have to send those pictures because she knows that those pictures are really just fulfilling a fantasy because the boy is insecure and he wants to feel the same things that he saw the guy in the porn video or magazine feel

or in the movie feel or what his buddy had it's like all of it comes from this general feeling of not feeling like they are enough yeah i want i want so much more for our kids i want more for your kids. I want more for your son. And I want more for those damn kids who couldn't stand up and be brave enough to risk their own standing with their own gender and say, what you're doing is not cool. Hey, bro, let's go hang out. That's what this is for. If young boys who turn and grow up to be men cannot learn how to be safe places for themselves, then this world is never going to be a safe space for anyone. Not for any of us. Yeah, that's beautiful. Well, I am so grateful that you are doing the work that you are to help because it's not just us with our kids and it's

not just our kids it's the whole community and this is where it starts so i hope many many many many many many many many boys more boys read your book and start to implement and i am so grateful for the time that you've spent and for all the wisdom that you're sharing and your own vulnerability and how much of you, we didn't even get into some of the aspects of your story that I wanted to, because I could talk to you all day about that. We'll do it again. We'll do it. We'll do it again. We'll do it again. We'll do a part two. I'm happy to come back and talk to you anytime. You're one of my favorite conversations. And, uh, and every time you talk about your son, it just, it opens me up and wrecks me. And, and I'm just sending you so much love because I know

that again, it's nonlinear. Yes, it is nonlinear. I'm becoming an accidental expert or not that I was a stranger to it before he died, but in grief. So yes, it is a squiggly, squirrely, switchbacky line, but I'm grateful for you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. me a prescription but there's no cure for crying