Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Talking Masculinity with Justin Baldoni

Episode Date: April 20, 2022

On this episode of “The Language of Love,” Dr. Laura Berman sits down for an intimate talk with Justin Baldoni, best known for his role as Rafael Solano on “Jane the Virgin.” Baldoni is also a director (“Five Feet Apart” and “Clouds”) and a podcaster (listen to “The Man Enough” podcast here). Solano is also the author of “Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity,” an engaging and daring exploration into what it means to be a ‘man’ in today’s society, and how we are failing boys and men in many ways. On this episode, you will learn: • Why the term ‘toxic masculinity’ can be harmful • How the definition of manhood has shifted in the last few decades, leaving many men struggling to find role models or clear examples of the kind of man they want to be • How dangerous gender roles can be when it comes to young boys who are encouraged to never cry or ask for help • How we can create gender equality without demonizing men or masculinity • How you can find your own definition for masculinity • Why women seem to be attracted to a certain type of masculinity, and how we can reconfigure our desires so that we don’t always go for the ‘bad boys’ Check out Justin Baldoni’s Man Enough book here, and keep an eye out for his new guide for middle-schoolers which will be published soon! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with The Language of Love is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own love sex relationship

questions and I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the Language of Love. I am so excited to have Justin Baldoni with us for this week's Language of Love. He's an American actor, a filmmaker, an author, and a podcast host. He's definitely known for portraying Rafael Solano on the romantic dramedy Jane the Virgin. He's also a director. He directed the film Five Feet Apart and Clouds. And he is the author of Man Enough, Undefining My Masculinity is the subtitle. And it is coming out in paperback on May 3rd. So I read Man Enough, Undefining My Masculinity. And I know the paperback comes out May 3rd, which is really exciting. yeah I loved it and one of the things I loved most about it is that the whole tone and all

the way through you're like I'm still figuring this shit out I still am yeah right many of us feel like we have to kind of be an expert in order to share but my whole premise is that we are always healing learning and teaching if we are in fact teachers guides healers whatever and that it's an ongoing process. And so I really appreciate since an undertone and an undercurrent of the whole book is about, it's okay to be vulnerable, right? From the start, you're like, I'm still figuring this shit out. I'm no expert. I'm in the middle of this journey, but I'll share with you what I figured out so far. Yeah. Thank you. First of all, thank you for reading it. I tried to, in the writing of the book, model what I was,

preaching, if you will. I think us men learn by modeling. Monkey see, monkey do. It was also the only way that I could write the book because it's deeply personal. Yeah, it is really personal. And you share a lot of, which I think obviously is the point because, and we'll talk about this in a second, this idea of the divine masculinity versus what many of us or many people in society called toxic masculinity. I hate that term anyway, because it is disparaging, but we're seeing a lot of it in the world right now, sort of this unconscious masculinity and a lot of it, which you describe very personally about your own upbringing and lots of different contexts is around sort of these scripts that we ascribe to and get sucked into because there's no other

detour coming in. There's no other change in trajectory. For you, there wasn't a man enough book or a Justin Baldoni or a teacher or a guide that was saying, no, these insecurities you're having are normal. And this lack of information, you feel you're not going to get it from these sources, but here's where you can get it. Exactly. And I know you are planning, which I think is so great you are planning to write a book for middle schoolers which i just finished i just finished uh two weeks ago i turned it in and uh it's coming out this fall which i'm really i'm really proud of this one i think this is this one's really needed and in many ways it goes deeper than man enough because in the year and a half in between the two i went deeper myself and i've done a lot

more healing. You have. What has changed for you over the past couple of years? I mean, we've all gone a lot deeper over the past couple of years, for sure, with all this shit happening in the world. But what would you say has evolved over the past couple of years since writing the book? Well, I mean, I wrote Man Enough between March and November of the pandemic, the first year. And so much has changed. I feel like it's hard being an author. And I write this in the book. You can't take it back and kind of wish I could have a do-over and write it again. What would you do differently? I think I would talk more and focus more on healing.

You know, it's really tricky writing a book about masculinity in today's climate because the word is polarizing. It is. You don't even have to say toxic masculinity for half of, you just say masculinity and And immediately, it's almost as if half of the population, in particular men, feel like they're under attack. And as a licensed therapist, you know that those who feel like they're under attack have a lot of healing to do because they're feeling vulnerable just by existing, right?

So they're putting on their armor and their shells. And it's also become so polarized and weaponized politically, ideologically. So I feel like I have so much more compassion for the men that are disagreeable. And I think that's one thing that if I had to do over, I would go deeper into is really my healing journey and healing in general and the healing that I think we need collectively. This understanding that, and I talk about this in the book, but just focusing on just how I believe good we are as men. And I talk about that in the book, but it's, but the problem is, you know, you have so much to tackle this idea of the patriarchy is so complex and layered, but the book can't be about that.

So I try to simplify it to make it about me and what my journey has been. Cause I don't want to be a teacher. I'm a student. So anyways, it's been a lot, but one thing I did go far deeper into for the middle grade book is sex. Oh, good. I'm so excited about that. And I want to talk to you about that, obviously, because it's one of my favorite topics, but also because you speak so beautifully about it in the book. And it's something so huge for middle schoolers. But I agree with you completely what you're saying right now, because as a mom of three boys, it has broken my heart. Before I got pregnant with my first son and certainly discovering my third son was a son, I had always imagined having girls and teaching them to be these empowered,

third feminine powerhouses and to own themselves and all the things that I know women struggle with. And I, and with my boys, you know, when I found out I was pregnant with my third boy, I was like, okay, obviously God wants me to raise three men who honor themselves and know how to honor everyone, including women. And of course, as soon as I, it was clear for each one that he was heterosexual, I felt like it was my job to teach them how to please a woman and where the clitoris is. I mean, that's something I can do. Damn. Good for you. It's amazing because then they don't have to try to learn through porn. Right. And I've talked to them and we're going to talk about porn, you and I, but I've talked to them a lot about porn. But International Women's

Day. Right. I ended up posting a video not about empowering women, but like, let's not bash men. We don't have to bash men to empower women. And I noticed like what every year on International Women's Day or when it was women's because it's all month in school. And my kids have all gone to progressive schools where there's a lot of this. And my youngest said to me leading up to women's day he's like oh crap it's international women's month and i was like well what's wrong with that oh i'm gonna be bashed all month i'm gonna hear about how much i suck all month everything out of my mouth i'm gonna be beaten up for and like he was dreading it oh that's so sad it broke my heart and i was like you should not one does not preclude the other defeats the purpose

It defeats the purpose. And I think if there's anything toxic, it's toxic anti-masculinity, right? Because we don't know. And I get we have to throw the baby at feels like when the pendulum is swinging far to the one direction in order to claim those rights that women haven't had for so long. Sometimes we get really extreme. But one of the things that I love, and I think you could write another book all about the healing. Oh, no, I need to take a break from writing, book. My wife's like, no more book. It's such an anxiety inducing thing for me. And because I'm in the process, I, like you said earlier, it's heal, learn, teach. Yeah. Eventually I probably will, but I'm going to take a little break right now and just heal. Please continue. No, no, no. But

I'm saying you will have plenty to say there, but what you're doing in man enough is lifting up your dress. So to speak, you know, you're saying, look, here I am this heartthrob kind of when you think about what sexy attractive successful by society's standards masculinity looks like it's I on the outside am that right like I have I'm successful in my acting career I have a gorgeous wife I have beautiful children I am hot I know you're not saying all this I'm saying this for you and yet Yeah. I totally don't feel like I'm enough a lot of the time. And I struggle with self-worth and body image. I mean, you were so honest about your body image issues, which I think we can't do enough. People who look have perfect bodies. We assume, oh, once I if I were to have a perfect body, I would feel good about myself. But the truth is, if you don't feel good about yourself, you never feel good about yourself, even with a perfect body. And the perfect body is coming from a place of scarcity and pain.

And I think that was one of the things. So let's just talk about body image for a second, because I know you spent a lot of time there and, you know, about the Adonis complex and about everything from penis size and the way porn affected that, your self-concept to. My wife just came in. Say hi. Hi. at some point I want to get the two of you on together I love your relationship oh she's incredible she's far more interesting than I am but the body image piece from penis size to abs and and how you talk about which I'm sure you

wrote about in the middle school boy book but like in the locker room how it starts so early comparing yourself and then you're first teased because your body isn't developed enough when you make it really developed and have that six-pack abs everybody's heckling you for being and you're pleased yeah because you make them feel insecure it's the conundrum of the patriarchy it ties into everything i mean just this idea of being a certain way looking like a certain way if i would only have that body, then I would feel good or enough. That applies to everything in this system. That's the illusion. That's the pyramid scheme of the patriarchy, if you will, is this illusion that like, if I just have that, or if I just get that, or if I just look like that, then I will be

enough. And enoughness is tied to happiness, right? Enoughness is contentment, which is tied. And that's just all a myth. None of it's real. It's all put in place to make us feel like we aren't enough so that we can buy something so that we can, you know, so that someone can sell us an idea of something. So we're profiting off of our not enoughness. And that's really the way the system is designed to work. Yeah. And for women as well. Well, no, especially for women, because men are the ones who created the system. We created the system and women aren't in the positions of power that create the system. So therefore- But men are susceptible to the system too, which is what I think is so powerful about what you're

saying i thought it was really cute you know you were blaming it on that brazilian model that i guess it was in the 80s or 70s you know yeah that guy yeah who did the calvin klein the first big image of the guy in his underwear yeah he's the pole the pole vaulter that's well i mean that's what men that were my dad's age were saying that's when they became aware of their bodies in america we've been doing that for women have been susceptible to those billboard images and magazine images forever but it was around that time that male images started to come out that were airbrushed and superhuman and setting a different standard and that's only part obviously of the body image issues that guys have but you're right that that probably was the beginning of men

starting to be like oh that's what i'm supposed to look like of course how do you increase consumerism among men by making them feel like they need something yeah they don't have enough So, of course, if they think that that's the ideal image of a man and women want that, then men want to be that. Therefore, then they'll buy the underwear. Yeah. And then they'll be happy, which, of course, they are. Right. Which then, of course, we're not. Exactly. Yeah. Well, let's talk about porn. Laura, we can talk about whatever you want to talk about.

Because I loved I have not seen a lot of men who aren't like clinicians treating this. A lot of men who are really honest about that cycle, that messed up cycle that is so easy to slip into of dopamine feeding rushes and using porn as a distraction when you're anxious, when you're bored, when you're hungry, when you can't go to sleep. It starts to become the panacea, the treatment for everything, like a knee-jerk reaction. And then it feeds on itself. And you really do get into that with how it affects the neural pathways. And this is what I've said to my boys and their friends. I remember them asking me around 12. One was 11, one was 12.

And they know I have a line of sexual aids and devices. And they said, hey, can you give us one for men? and i said well i will happily give you one for men but only if you don't use it with porn you have to use it with fantasy laura how cool is that like i hope to be as cool of a parent as you that my kids will like ask me talk about that i mean literally ask you for a sex toy that's pretty mind-blowing and how open you must be with them i am very open and they have all said that while it was mortifying when they were young as they reached their later teen years and my oldest is 25 it definitely has come in handy but what I thought was so interesting and it really shocked

me as I said I'll give it to you if you use it with fantasy and it was the two of them with like a couple of their friends and they looked at me like I was speaking gibberish like fantasy what do you mean it's like well you use fantasy you know your imagination and they were like looking at me blankly and i was like okay i had to like explain to them the process what your imagination is yes a sexual imagination right like oh so you see a hot girl or even if you saw something on porn before and you reimagine it you're using your imagination to play out a movie in your head that is arousing i had to explain to them how to self-stimulate without porn because these boys are just having it especially since porn hub it's just which hopefully is on its way to be

taken down also i hope so i follow a few accounts that are that are actively trying to take it down just based on the amount of rapes and sexual assaults that they post it's so crazy and they are you know it used to be and i know you write about this you know when you were a kid you were finding, if you were lucky, somebody's father's Playboys or magazines. When I was a kid, it was finding the Playboys or the Joy of Sex, that book that every couple seemed to have. You had to go out of your way. You had to go out of your way to find. When I was your kid's 10, 12, 13, there was a family computer. And I'm 38 now. So we didn't have, I can't imagine having access at 10, 12 years old on my phone. And keep in mind, a family computer with dial-up internet

only gave you an image a minute. So it was the anticipation was almost as much as anything else. And now we're just on a dopamine overload, but it's not just porn. It's the entire tension economy is designed to trigger a dopamine fix and need to keep us scrolling in every area. Yeah. Porn is just one of the ways to get your fix. I mean, I would argue that TikTok and Instagram and all of these things, and even our news feeds these days and actual news is it's all the same thing. What's the story? What am I going to get next? Yes. You know, like a minute attention span. Well, you have no, now it's less. What's it now? Five to eight seconds, they're saying. And we're also doing that the same thing with dating. I mean, it's all random reward theory,

as you know, all designed to keep us fixated on something, wondering what's next, anticipating what's next then it comes and you know that there might be something better so you keep looking and we never stop and so our brains never have a chance to actually settle in and feel the things that we need to feel because all those neuropathways are starting so young yeah they're starting so young they are and i know that you write about how your first exposure to porn was at age 10 which is that in your day that was pretty early that's that's now average yeah it's now average and even when my oldest my 25 year old we had this it was before smartphones and I could outlaw porn and explain to him why with my younger ones I couldn't unless I put them on

a bubble on a mountaintop I was not you know even if I took their phones away they were going to be looking at someone else's smartphone right so it was less about trying to shield them from that and more trying to educate them about the implications of it, you know, and how to and the reality versus not reality, because you're right that, you know, when you write about this, that so many men get I've always said this is sex, that porn is the worst sex educator there is. I mean, everything about it is wrong when it comes to learning education. Yeah.

when it comes to what to expect about what genitals look like what men and women look like what turns them on what is healthy sexuality what the normal sexual response i mean all of it yeah is false i couldn't agree more and i love the message that you give to women and i know that this book is for men but it's also for women because first of all women buy and read more books more women have bought the book also and then they read it and they give it to men in their life yeah But I love how you say, because I say this to women all the time, but I think it means more coming from you, that if your partner is watching porn or can't seem to stop watching porn, it's not because of a deficiency in you. Yeah, that was important. That was really important for me. In hetero relationships, it's not about the woman or her attractiveness or her inability to perform or if there's some deficiency in her. The majority of the time, the vast majority of the time, it's a man struggling with something he doesn't even know he's struggling with. Because we've normalized it to such this, the porn dynamic is so strange because you have large groups of men who will talk about it, who will joke about like something they saw on, you know, Pornhub or something because it's so normalized.

So they've normalized it kind of like the dad bod has been normalized, right? From the male gaze, from that patriarchal lens, it's normalized. and then you have a whole another group of men who are secret about secretive about it and hide it because there's so much shame around it generally the religious population and as we know is the one really creating the demand for the porn industry because we're dealing with so much repression and none of it is working none of it's accurate and because you know and then now you have you have young girls watching porn because they think that's how they have to perform. I know that breaks my heart. So you almost are conditioning young boys and girls

to not like consent is no longer a real thing. You have aggressive. I mean, we know that the majority of porn is very aggressive. You know, we're talking borderline, like sexual assault and granted that that's changing. And I know there are female movements to change some of these things. I would argue that there should be an age limit on it. Just like there is in the stores when you would want to go into to buy a magazine. I just, you know, our brains, our brains aren't developed enough to be able to watch these things and to be able to see these images because our brains are built in such a way that these images are meant to help us procreate yeah so when we're that young we're just like it's just basically like giving us heroin yeah

the only way that i got through to my boys is because you know of course what the hell do i know i'm grown up and they're infallible and immortal at that age right yes the only thing that got them was the truth when i said to them look this actually if you are consistently using porn to reach arousal and orgasm you are accidentally training your body in a way where it's going to be hard to reach arousal and orgasm with a real woman good way to go laura way to scare them there's data that supports that no there's data that supports that and so you're not you're not lying to them. It's very, very true. I didn't tell them they would grow hair on their palms or anything like that. I told them. I know. I think that's what my dad told me. I don't even know

where the hell that came from. And the other thing that no one really talks about, especially for young boys, is that when we're looking at images on computers, sexual images, whatever, our brain is associating those images with things not with people yeah with objects so then therefore the thing that we are training our brains that we're developing our brains as we're watching porn especially when we're really young is we're training our brains to see if they're women that they're looking at they're looking at women as objects yeah i wonder why that is i thought that was interesting too and you mentioned you wrote about this in your book that study that showed that when the part of the brain that lights up when men watch porn or anyone watches porn

is the part that perceives objects, not people. And I wonder why that is. Is it because it's a, well, I think it's not just porn. I think it's in general watching things. I think that's, there's a good chance that that study could have been geared towards porn. But I think that if you would, I think that if I were looking at you through an MRI right now, I'd be an object. You'd be an object because you're in a computer. Right. And I, and I don't think our brains are able to tell the difference between something that a screen it's like exactly exactly so I think that's part of it but again you're still training yourself and if you train yourself to you know I try to tell guys if you train yourself to bench press a certain way and you're bench pressing

wrong your whole life it's going to be very hard to untrain that when you learn how to run if you don't want to run with the proper mechanics then you're going to run like that the majority of your life, then you have to spend years on training and unlearning that behavior. So it's very hard to unlearn seeing women as objects and not people, but it's very, I mean, the data is there. You look at the amount of women who are sexually assaulted and raped, right? The numbers, as we know, are staggering. Well, that only happens when we see a gender as something that isn't human yeah there's an object we could never do that that's why statistics and numbers and even war right i know we're we're watching a war unfold right now and we're seeing these images and these

companies are profiting off of putting the images of of bodies russian soldiers ukraines people that are killed they're people they're humans i know but we're reducing them to one side or another together and seeing these images, it's war porn. It's all the same thing. And then we're so desensitized to it. And again, the same thing happens with video games. This is why, as I said, it's so hard to write a book about this. I could have a whole chapter on the same way that video games affect one's dopamine. And look at what we're doing in video games. We're desensitizing ourselves to crime, to violence, and to prostitution. As if us men need to be desensitized anymore to that stuff right we're feeding the beast over and over and over and over again and

when reality like we should be teaching like we should be having video games and experiences that help our young boys recognize the humanity in themselves and in the world and how they can you know let's come up with games that teach us how to be like humans and how to not just be saviors and how to use our our masculine qualities if we will to increase happiness and make the world better and to gamify that in some way like there's all kinds of things that you can do i don't think it just has to be the lowest common denominator of our like carnal desires that we develop these video games and porn websites well if anyone can make that cool and popular you can right like if one of these moms come out with a game like that they'd be like please send it to

me i'll invest in it let's go i really want to talk to you and i know you wrote in lots of different contexts in your book about this, about bullying. And one of the things that you were really honest about, which I'm sure you wrote about in your middle school book and is so, so important is how you were so often bullied and almost in response were often the bully as well, playing that most of us, and I've seen this with all three of my boys were, especially the older two were extremely bullied and I remember even with the older one there were incidences where he was bullying but it was so clear that it was a result of him being bullied and I also think I mean I don't know to what extent you're aware of my story but my middle son uh tragically died

yeah yeah I am Laura and I'm so sorry thank you but but the reason I'm bringing it up now is because I know that the dominoes that fell that ultimately led to him experimenting with a pill he got through Snapchat that was counterfeit fentanyl and killed him was because he was trying to stop the bullying. He kept saying to me, I need to be able to smoke pot. I need to be able to do some drugs, which I wouldn't permit and wouldn't. And I was testing him because he had experimented with cannabis. So I was regularly spontaneously testing him to make sure he wasn't doing it. So he was trying to negotiate with me with us and saying, look, I need to do it because the kids are so mean to me and they won't include me. And the only kids who will hang out with me

are the kids that get high, but they won't hang out with me if I don't get high because then they think I'm a narc. And so I need to be able to get high. And I would say, no, I refuse to. I wish I could on one level. Like there's part of me that wants to say, OK, honey, just so you don't have to be in this pain. Go get high. But I'm not going to say that because it's not OK because of these assholes who won't be friends with you unless you do drugs. I can't as your mother say yes to that. And so let's try to find you friends in another context, which he just wouldn't do. And also it was the pandemic. But I know that what ultimately led because he was trying to impress his friends and a girl with this drug dealer and and screenshots of the drug dealer's

menu and I'm going to get this drug and try it. And he was trying to not be bullied. He was trying to be accepted. And just the pain of watching the ways and as a parent, you're you feel so powerless and you try in all the ways you can to support them and to get the school to support them. But at a certain age, the school even stepping in makes the situation worse. You know, by the time they're in middle school and certainly high school, it's so toxic. And I think it's so beautiful the ways in which you painted these pictures of what was going on inside you when you were being humiliated and bullied and how you were the bravado that you were trying to put forward and the ways in which you realized in 2020 hindsight that then you moved forward and found a victim to

do to them to play the role of the bully so that you could kind of put some salve on that part of you that was bullied and take some toxic power back. So I think that was really, I want to get your perspective on that. Cause I think it's so important. I mean, you just did it just as good as I ever could. I just, my heart just breaks for you as a mother. And I'm so sorry. You've it as I, as I was getting ready for your interview, I saw that you had lost your son and I just, um, I'm so sorry that our, uh, our culture and our system in this country has failed you in that way. And it makes me really sad for you. I know what it's like to be that boy. And that's why I'm crying is I know what it's like to be that man. And there's so many young boys like

your son, like me that are in so much pain that have nowhere to go because all we want is to be accepted and liked and to feel like we're enough as we are. So there's no matter what you do as a parent, no matter how great of a mom or a dad you are, all we want is to be seen and to be liked and to be loved and to feel like we're good enough. And now we have this obsession in the patriarchy, this illusion that if we just hold enough power, then we will feel enough. We'll feel man enough, feel masculine enough well the women will want us the girls will want us if you're gay the guys will want us whatever it is it's like we have this masculine ideal of what we think we need to be and in every system in every whether it's uh look at sexual assault we know the majority of men

who are sexually assaulting have been hurt hurt people hurt people that's why you know again if I do write another book, it'll be about healing because healed people can heal. And whatever that cycle is, if we're not feeling enough, we have to find a way to feel enough. So what do us men do knowing that specifically us men need to be in positions of power to feel enough? We get that power by any means necessary. Dog eat dog, whatever we can do, even if it's risking our lives, we will find a way to get that power to get that hit and i believe it that's at the root of sexual assault yeah i agree men men who feel powerless who've been hurt need to also then inflict hurt men who feel like they're not understood by women then need to take control and feel powerful

you know men who look at all the men i mean boys before the age of eight and ten the sexual assault abuse numbers are staggering. It's one in every player on your basketball team. And yet what happens? They hide it. They don't talk about it, but they end up being the bully. They need to have some control over something in their lives, but it's not just people that have been sexual assaulted. It's everybody. It's me. I just wanted to feel like the other guys. And when I was bullied, I felt powerless. So the quickest way for me to get that hit of power was to exercise my dominance over something else, anything else. That's where the abuse of women comes from. We just want to feel powerful. So you have these little men who want to feel powerful,

so they abuse. Look at masculine big men that abuse. You would think in your mind, you know you're big and strong. You don't need to hit a woman, but inside you're just the little boy who was bullied or sexual assaulted or just never seen by the people in your life. And you are just acting that out as a grown human being. It doesn't matter how big you are. And this is the conversation that I have with my wife all the time. Half of my insecurities, I have no reason to have them because they're not present. 10 year old Justin has them. Well, he's often driving the bus, just like the rest of us. He's always driving the bus, but it starts with these young boys. So I try, especially in this book that's coming out in October, to walk these young boys through the

thought process of bullying. But then even more so, which again, it makes me emotional, we can't lose any more people to suicide. We can't lose any more young people to suicide because they're being bullied or because some boy who wanted to feel popular or powerful convinced her to take a naked picture and then showed everybody and sent it around school. This is the stuff that's happening. It's never happened in the history of our planet before because we've never had the ability to bully virtually. So explaining then to young boys, especially the damage that can come from bullying and how people are taking their lives and then making sure that if they're a young person reading the book and they're having these suicidal thoughts or being bullied,

they have to reach out to somebody. And that's the huge thing is, but for a lot of young people, they don't feel safe enough. They don't feel like there's any safety. Or they feel embarrassed or even when I would say to my kids, which I did all the way through, I would explain to them the dynamics of bullying. And I was like, you need to understand that the reason he's speaking to you this way and treating you this way is because he feels horrible about himself. Like I would explain that to them and they could intellectually understand that. But at the same time, they're going in their brains. It's like I remember this therapist and it just it just struck me so deeply and I've never forgotten it. He said, what kids that are being bullied like this, it's the equivalent in their brains and in their neurochemicals as someone in a war zone, because every single day they are going to war. There is no safety. And they are going to school every day knowing that they're going to be marginalized, humiliated, bullied.

They're like you talk about in the book, trying to just stay so small and invisible and hoping nobody, the bully or whoever, doesn't think of you or notice you to pick on you. And of course they do. And then all the bystanders. I mean, that's been my focus is I got reached out to by so many kids who were in school with my son who died afterwards. And if there's anything I can do, please let me know. And I said, what you can do is change the way you behave. When you saw my son being humiliated in the halls, you saw him going into, you know, and eating with the coaches, the football coaches, rather than in the lunchroom because he was so humiliated. And I'm not saying that was your fault, but next time say something, say it's not okay to talk to people like that. So-and-so invite that person to sit at your table, just the slightest reaching out by the, all the bystanders who don't of course want to do anything because then they don't want to be in the spotlight of the bully, right? Once they stand up. That brings it back to who are the boys going to listen to? Yeah. The boys are going to listen to their dads. Yeah, you're right. The

boys are gonna listen to their dads and the girls will listen to their moms that's just the way that it is right now and if the dads are not saying that the boys are not going to do that and what do we know about dads a lot of them aren't even around yeah they're so fixated on their work and providing and and all of the things that us men are having to figure out and navigate today which is real by the way this is why the patriarchy hurts everybody especially men this is why i don't say toxic masculinity. The only thing that's toxic about it is how hurt we all are as men. We're hurt and we're hurting people because we're hurt. But if us men are not present and paying attention to our children and to our, especially our young boys and modeling by example, what

empathy and compassion looks like, their boys aren't going to have any idea. The only way you can stop bullying is by modeling empathy. Yeah, you're right. So a father has to say, no, we don't talk to other kids that way. You don't talk to boys that way. In fact, what we should be doing is when you see somebody, when you see a victim of any sort of oppression, now we got transgender kids that are recognizing who they are at a young age. We have gay kids that are out in the open. And if they're being bullied, you go and you defend that person. You don't have to agree with them. What I'm going to say to my boy is, if you get beat up for standing up for someone who can't, I'm so proud of you. That's what I want him to do.

Don't run from that shit. You step up. Because when someone can't defend themselves, somebody has got to step up and defend them. And that's not just fighting. That's emotional bullying too. We got to pull ourselves away from this need and desire to feel like we are liked and enough by other hurting people, by other boys who don't feel like they fit in. So they create this idea of what it means to fit in. That's the problem. And that's what we're doing as adults too. Yeah. We do it to each other as adults as well. It's all the same stuff. We have to learn how to see each other as people, as human beings. When we do that and we do that at home and we do that right here in our backyards and our own family systems, that's how you change

the world that's how we start to see each other as one human family that's that's when war starts to end yeah it starts in your own house starts in your own school yeah take a bunch of dads and boys out into the woods justin and get them going i just you know again and that's where but that's the thing is the work starts with each of us trust me i've had all those people come to me like you know teach classes and do the you know men's programs and stuff and it's like i'm still just doing it for myself. You know, we have to individually do the work with the man in the mirror. That's where it starts. But most people don't know how to do that. So what would you say, right? Like if you're listening to this, and this is why I was thinking like you need to take them

and show them, you're still figuring it out, but you're much further along than your average father, right? Let's just talk about fathers because that's where it stops, right? The fathers, as you were saying, teach the sons and condition the sons and obviously directly addressing the sons as you have in your middle schooler book is part of it. But it's also about really changing the way that you model for your boys. Right. And women can do this to a certain extent, but it has to come from other men. So what would you say? How are you figuring it out? How are you healing enough to be able, what are you doing to be able to sort of do this in your own backyard? It starts with an awareness. It starts with that feeling that each of us have when our actions

are not in alignment with our intentions. When we say something we wish we didn't say, or we do something we wish we didn't do, or we're not in control of our anger or our reactions to something. Instead of passing it off as, oh, I'm a man, I'm allowed to be angry. Because that's one of the two emotions I'm allowed to feel. It's like, hold on, where's this coming from? Or that person's upset at me. Maybe I shouldn't gaslight them and make them think that they're crazy so that I feel powerful and I don't feel bad about what I did. Maybe they're saying something real that I need to look at. It's an awareness of our behavior and how it's affecting other people, not just ourselves. It's checking in and wondering like,

huh, why am I not feeling happy today? Or for most men, I would say, who don't even recognize or realize they suffer from anxiety. And I would argue that most men do, they just don't know it. It's, oh man, why is my chest tight? Why is my chest tight? Oh, I can't take a deep breath. And then they just move on with their lives. Like, no, maybe there's something going on there. 38 years old. I didn't know I had anxiety until I was 35. And I'm fairly progressive in terms of my emotional intelligence. So we all are suffering and we're not realizing it. So healing starts in the same way that the program, the AA starts, which is recognizing that you were powerless over something, recognizing that there is something out of your control that you need help with.

It's not saying I'm broken and I'm screwed up and I'm fucked up and I'm not lovable and I'm not all of these things because deep down, I think all of us men, humans are doing that anyways because of the way that society and the system is set up to make us feel like we're terrible. It's just looking at it and saying, I want to be better. I want to feel happier. I want more joy in my life. I want a better relationship. I want to make my kids feel loved. I want my wife or my partner to feel loved. I just want to be a better person.

That's where healing begins. I think you're right. And then have you found, I'm sure you've tried and worked with all sorts of healers and clinicians and everybody's different. but have you found in terms of this issue of really showing up as your authentic self and fostering empathy that starts with for yourself and then you can start to model for others and for your children i'm just curious i know it's not a one-size-fits-all approach but is there a kind of therapy or treatment or healing that you have found particularly helpful i mean i i've

done a lot of different types of healing work and therapy work. I would say the most frustrating and beneficial for me has been somatic therapy. Me too. And to anyone who doesn't know what somatic therapy is, I mean, it's just essentially getting in touch with your body and where your feelings live in your body. As a former athlete, I suffer from a lot of muscle injuries when I am explosive, as an example. That's where I've held my stress is in my connective tissues. and I think that the body keeps the score as you know and a lot of us hold our emotions and stress in our bodies a lot of men I believe we hold our anxiety and our stress in our lower back and our mid-back that's why we have you know that's why our backs go out all the time

there's a book about the fact that back pain doesn't actually exist it's just emotion really tell me the title I think it's called I think it's called no more back pain okay Um, but, but just this idea that all of our pain, they found that when they did like a double blind study and they had all these men come in, get to get MRIs, many of them had the exact same systemic issues that the other men had and had in their hair vertebrae, but half of the men had no pain and half of them did. So then it's like, well, okay, well that herniated disc isn't causing this person pain. So it can't just be physiological.

Right. It's the same herniated disc was this in this person and he has no symptoms. So what else is going on there? And that's where we haven't really, I don't think gotten to in Western medicine is this understanding of so much of the root of our illnesses are, are pent up, trapped, unexpressed emotions. Amen. And I discovered that the hard way when I sort of tried to barrel through the loss of

my mom when she died of breast cancer. And within a year I had breast cancer. Oh my God. And that was one of the greatest lessons of my life. But it also led me to when I lost Sammy. I was like, I am not going to do that again. And it's hard somatic. You can talk these things out, but it's very different than really feeling them, feeling them, letting them move. and people are so scared to do that because they feel like i'm gonna be in a whirlwind of pain that's never gonna end you know they think if they let go into that that it's just gonna carry them away so i love that you do that too and all of us release pain differently but again this is we're talking about we're talking about calculus and most men are in basic addition when it comes

to healing. And so I wouldn't recommend somatic therapy to most men. I'd recommend just start talking about your feelings, emotions. Because I remember the first time a therapist ever asked me what emotions I was feeling, my brain gave the answer. And then I realized like, wow, I don't even have a vocabulary for the various emotions that I'm feeling because nobody, I've never had to. Nobody ever asked men how we're feeling. And that's another issue. As men, we're not asked, how are we feeling? How do we feel about that? Because honestly, nobody cares. Or when I ask my kids, they're like, stop being a talking doctor. Yeah, but that's the truth. Nobody cares because as men, we're both the oppressors and the victims.

That's just the way that the world is right now. But we all have so many feelings and we have to allow ourselves to feel, but we have to first recognize and be able to verbalize what a feeling is before we can actually feel the feeling. Well, that's where it all begins. And I think it's so beautiful. I am so grateful for the work that you are doing in the world. I know it's been as much for yourself and your own journey, and you're just sharing it along the way with us, but I am very grateful for you. And I'm grateful for the kids that you and your wife are raising because they're going to be very emotionally intelligent. And I'm sure they will test us and all the ways we need to be tested.

Oh, they will test the shit out of you. They're our greatest teachers, always. Yes, they are. No matter what we do. I want to just ask you one last question that I love to ask every guest that comes on. And I think you'll have a great answer, which is what would you say one of the greatest

or the greatest, but it'll probably be one of the greatest, lessons that you've learned that you can share about love, about how to love and be loved better? About love. Oh. What has helped you most with love and relationships? There's so many. I think that love is a choice. We have this Western idea that love happens to us, like we don't have control. Just falling in love is kind of a passive approach. When in reality, that takes away,

I think, our agency and we get to choose to love. Yeah. And choose to stay in love. which is the second piece. And I was never really one to let my dad give me advice growing up. I struggled a lot with that. But one of the things he said to me, which is one of my favorite things he's ever said, I think I wrote about it in the book, is he told me that him and my mom really struggled. I asked him, this was way later. And I was like, dad, why didn't you tell me this when I was 15? But I was in my 20s and I was struggling in a relationship. And he told me that there were times when he didn't know if he loved my mom and they were really on the fringes, but he woke up every day and made a

choice to love her. That summarizes who my dad is. And my mom did the same thing. And that's why 39 years later, they're still together. I do that every day. I think he knows, although I don't know if I've ever had this explicit conversation with him, but every morning we give each other he's usually up before I am sitting at the table doing whatever he's doing on his computer and I come in and he puts it away he stands up and gives me this full body hug and every single morning I say I just send love from my heart into his and I say I choose to be with you today I choose to live today I don't say it out loud but I say it to myself because it really is a choice i love that so much that you said that that's beautiful i love and it's been so

helpful to me in my marriage it's so helpful and it doesn't mean that you stick your head in the sand when things really aren't working and that you say i choose to love this abuser i choose to love this toxic relationship it's that you are choosing to stay and to invest and to love and And it can't come from fear. That's the second piece of advice is in the Baha'i faith, Baha'i, Abdu'l-Baha, actually Baha'u'llah says that love never dwelleth in a heart possessed by fear. It says love is a light that never dwelleth in a heart possessed by fear. So you can't even make that choice if you're coming from a place of fear. So if you're using this other person, if I'm using another person to fill a void and I'm not full, that's fear.

yeah that's fear that i'm not enough that persons can make me which is why then we have such codependency and we can't let people go when they're when they're hurting us and abusing us and all of these types of things so it's like being full yourself or as full as you can be and then letting that overflow into love so that you can make the choice but you can't make the choice on fear because fear is tricky fear can monopolize the voice in your head and and make you think something that's not and it's learning to distinguish and make decisions in love over fear especially in relationships that I think is really really important that's a great point and I love that I always say you have to be your huge beautiful delicious cake and the other person is

the icing but I like yours even more that you're so full of love that it's like a fountain overflowing onto the other person I think that's beautiful and it's not always going to be that way and and and and and in relationships that that changes just like the masculine and the feminine right but i think as a model we just have we have to stop approaching relationships from a place of scarcity that this person will make me feel better this person will make me because then all we're doing is we're doing the same thing we do with porn or with bullying or with anything we're we're empty of ourselves trying to fill ourselves up with somebody else and that doesn't ever work last. No, it doesn't. Thank you so much. Thank you for everything. Thank you for spending time

with me. This has been so great. And definitely pick up Man Enough. It comes out, the paperback version releases May 3rd. I'm excited. I hope you'll come back on when your children's book comes out because I'm so excited for that. Yeah, middle grade. Yeah. Well, your boys will have to read it. I will. I'm going to make them read it. I'll read it to you. Thank you so much, Laura. All right. Enjoy. And thank you so much for spending time with me. It was a pleasure. I can't fall asleep without your arms around me