Moore Style - Exploring Masculinity and Emotional Intelligence with Brendan Kwiatkowski

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

As a researcher and educator around men’s emotional well-being, Brendan Kwiatkowski is here to help break the stigma around men's emotional expression. Unfortunately, men have been taught to suppress and restrict their most vulnerable emotions, leaving them disconnected from themselves.  Join us as Brendan shares about the social pressures that men face, the impact of connecting with your inner child, and the importance of emotional intelligence. This conversation is full of eye-opening insights that everyone can benefit from and is a must-listen! In this week’s episode, we discuss: [02:04] About Brendan Kwiatkowski [03:20] What led Brendan to become a researcher and educator  [06:25] Suicide and hopelessness [08:41] The amount of pressure on men [11:54] Emotional expression in men and women [15:51] The 3 different masculine pressures to fit in  [21:43] Tapping into your authenticity  [26:08] Navigating gender roles in society [31:25] Connecting with your inner child [36:17] The importance of checking in with ourselves [40:31] Holding space for distress [44:26] Emotional dysregulation around past wounds [47:22] Emotional intelligence [54:19] One of Brendan's favorite dates   Connect with Brendan: Website  Instagram Tik Tok

Welcome to the down and dirty podcast, the ultimate guide to modern midlife dating. I'm your host Celeste Moore and I'm here to help you navigate the challenges of today's dating world. Think of me as your female version of hitch but better with over 16 years of experience as a certified image consultant and dating coach. I've got the inside scoop on what women want. In this podcast, we're diving deep into the world of healthy masculinity and modern dating. It's a fast changing industry. And here you'll find personal stories, expert insights

and candid conversations that will empower you to take control of your dating life. There's never been a better time to achieve your desired outcome, whether it's marriage, finding a significant other, securing a life partner or simply regaining your dating confidence. We're here with you twice a week to explore the viewpoints and challenges in today's dating arena that resonate with every man seeking dating success and love. So let's dive into today's episode. We've got an exciting discussion lined up for you. Get ready for the double D's of dating where dating dilemmas turn into dating triumph. i want to welcome everybody to another episode of the down and dirty podcast

as always i'm your host celeste moore excuse me for my little rough voice today i'm not a smoker uh just a little sore throat but i appreciate everybody who continues to show up here and listen to these shows i put this out to educate people to hopefully bring little nuggets out into their relationship and that they can grow and evolve. And if you feel so inclined to please leave a review for the show, five stars would be amazing. It really just brings it to the forefront and helps everybody in return. So I'm super, super excited to talk to my guest today. But before we dive into the episode, I would love to introduce him. His name is Dr. Brendan Kwiatkowski and he is a researcher and educator focused on the social emotional development and

well-being of boys and men and how that intersects with the well-being of their of others excuse me his PhD research investigated teenage boys experiences and beliefs about being male and compared their experiences based on their levels of emotional expression He is super passionate about focus, positive focus, and person-centered research that humanizes and empowers participants, as well as in research that is transformative and practically useful for people in the real world. He lives in Vancouver, BC, where he teaches at a local university and loves breathwork, cold plunges, and lots of other things. Cold plunges. Wow. I love that about you because I wish I felt the same way. Thank you for being on the show today. Thanks so much for having me.

It's great to be here. Yes. So there's so much to talk about. You have so many different facets of your research and your experience with not only teenage boys, but men. And I would love to hear a little bit more about your backstory and how your journey kind of went down this road of achieving let's say your doctorate yeah so I was a high school teacher in Vancouver BC and I wanted to do my master's in special education and while I was

doing that I found the statistic that around 81 percent of all students diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disorders are male and so that led me on an academic journey towards like how much of this in biology how much of this in sociology and I was a biology teacher and a history teacher prior to that so I was really curious about that question and long story short is that regardless of the importance of biology is that the social factors around masculinity do play a huge role in sort of how boys and men show up in the world and I became really interested in that I developed programs for male teenagers with behavioral needs and then long story short I realized there was so much complexity in this topic sometimes in common conversations around masculinity and so my PhD

research really wanted to pry apart the complexities specifically around emotional expression so yeah I compared the least emotionally expressive to the most emotionally expressive teenage boys who are age 17 to 19, but there's also a thing in social sciences that all research is me-search, and so that's like my academic way of starting, but I don't think I realized when I set out of how much introspection to my own kind of gendered upbringing there was, I often say, like the first memory I have of gender being like thing, I grew up in an evangelical church and I remember asking my parents about like, oh, why

is the woman, why is the woman's pastor always called a coordinator if the other pastors are always called pastors? And that was the church I was at growing up was like, didn't believe that women could be in the pastor role. So I remember I just kind of always stuck out to me as something looking back on and just like yeah my own relationship with masculinity is a huge I'll be lying if it wasn't kind of a part of my own research and of course I've also been impacted by the suicides of people in my life and we know statistics of men greater disproportionate rate

of dying from suicide and so yeah all these factors together it's like I care about this topic for multiple reasons. Yeah, I really love that. And I'm so sorry for your personal experience with suicide. And I was actually going to bring that up later in the show, but I'd love to kind of dive into just that little piece right there. I've had a few topics about men and their roles in society and their and emotions and how we view a man being showing up with his you know emotions and if it's okay and all this stuff but i mean no that's a lot but i know that the suicide rates are extremely get are extremely high in men and from what i understand is the reasoning for this is because they don't know how to properly express their feelings and emotions and if they

do they they could be shamed i mean i'm sure there's so much more to it but i know that that's such a huge problem in our society yeah that's a hundred percent a huge factor to that but if i could speak more to it i think sometimes i could overemphasize because there's a especially around middle-aged men there's a significant body of research in the UK that like 91% of middle-aged men who died from suicide sought help within the month prior to suicide so it's not just that they like they won't seek help at all although the masculine belief that you shouldn't show your emotion and you shouldn't seek help from others those are two major factors in why suicide rates can be higher but the main thing that also factors in masculinity too but the main thing

or one of the main factors with suicide rates is the feelings of hopelessness and those when like circumstances it's kind of like when this whole terrible mixture of things of like yeah Maybe you're less likely to share your emotions because you might get shamed for it. You don't want to be a burden to people. Maybe it's also because you're not used to seeking help from other people. And so you're not as familiar in knowing how to do that. But it's kind of like when that combines with like losing your job or a relationship ending where you just don't see hope, a light at the end of the tunnel, then that

kind of exacerbates the situation, which increases your odds of dying from suicide. and do you think as a society we put more pressure on men to have it together know what to do be the provider do you feel that that's not as prevalent as it was i don't know 20 30 years ago it's always hard to answer the question of more um like do we have more pressure now than later or more compared to women i think that there is different pressure like i think there's kinds of pressures for women of having of doing everything and looking effortlessly doing it and i think that there's still a huge amount of pressure on men that sometimes on men puts them on themselves society also puts on men of to be wearing the pants in the relationship quote unquote or

yeah being the breadwinner provider and it's a changing world because the amount of of women or female partners in relationships that bring in equal or more income than their male partners are hugely significant and so like things are things are changing and obviously there's always going to be reactions to whether that change is good or bad but yeah but you can also look at statistics of women yeah by working more but they're also still doing more of the household work at the house and so there's lots of tension and complexity in answering that question but there's still tons of pressure on men to have their shit together by that i mean like to have their financial stuff in order or their emotions in check because there's a sense

however accurate or not that if i am too emotional aka weak then no woman is going to love me or they don't actually want that even if even if the social media is like trying to go towards positive masculinity which is more emotionally expressive one of the most common comments I see online on social media is like oh no you can't actually trust a woman with that they'll just use that against you so there's so much with so much polarization as I'm sure you're aware yeah and I thank you for touching on that I've had quite a few not just clients but men feel very comfortable speaking to me. I hope I allow a space that's really nonjudgmental and I just listen. And I've had multiple men come to me with a traumatic experience that they've had in their

life. And a few have said, I've said that to one other person and I got basically shamed for it or something was something more like, oh, you know, oh, you shouldn't say that or whatever it was, this person really needed to express they needed to let out some trauma that had happened to them and after that experience he chose not to ever bring that up again and live with that inside and that to me is just like heart-wrenching and I really hope that you working with younger generation and teenagers and that this you know starts to close that gap a little bit That reminds me of a theme I identified in my research of these teenage boys, that the boys that were the most emotionally expressive, I called it women as emotional safe havens. So these emotional safe havens that the boys that were more emotionally expressive tended to prefer to talk about their more vulnerable emotions, such as sadness or fear, with the women in their lives, whether that was their peers or their mothers.

And so I think there's a lot of tension here. And so I'm going to address them. One is that women, like in what the research indicates, are often a huge source of emotional connection for men. And then if you look at the women, a lot of them like being that to a point, but they wish it was reciprocated more that it wasn't like sometimes someone would feel like, yeah, totally. I love showing up that way.

And then some, it's on like, it feels one sided. I've been in so many relationships. where i've been kind of teaching them more about their emotions being a sounding board for them and their emotional expression and it hasn't been reciprocated as much and so let me tell like women do more of the emotional labor in a relationship or emotional work in a relationship and then there's another dynamic that i have a theory about is that a lot of these boys in my research they said like oh yeah they'll view their male relationships different than their their female relationship so they'll view like the boys in their lives as like okay i'm gonna

have fun with them i'm gonna hang out with them invent about things i'm angry about but i'm not gonna share my real my true my full vulnerability but i'll save that for the women in my life and so sometimes when i hear i want to preface this i don't want to devalue or minimize any man's experience who has had their emotions weaponized against them i'm not questioning that happened whatsoever i'm curious as how many of those men have maybe those women in their lives were some of the most vulnerable relationships they've ever been in before so like if you haven't been as vulnerable or authentic with all your emotional experiences like with your male friends then it's it's almost giving like you're putting all your eggs in one basket of like if you

do it with just one woman rather than if you kind of had multiple friends to do that with i wonder if that exacts your base that's kind of my theory is that like yeah that's why it can be so painful and why you might shut down because you were so hurt by that relationship by that woman in that relationship but i have this question in my mind of i wonder if that's because yeah you gave your vulnerable self to that one person and that you haven't had that much as much experience kind of having more of that so you're kind of more able to like have some practice in emotionally vulnerable relationships that makes a lot of sense yeah it's good to know a little bit more about that situation i i really want to talk about i love

that you brought up that you know the teenagers excuse me um you said when the ones that are 17 to 19 what did you you found that they were sorry they were more emotional or that wasn't due to age that was oh i had 170 of them in my research and i gave them a screening tool with a couple things to determine how willingly how willing they were to talk about their feelings with other people in their lives so then i ranked them based on their willingness to express their emotions honestly with people in their lives and so then I compared the least emotionally expressive to the most emotionally expressive and how different their beliefs and experiences were okay perfect and what did you find with the the boys that were more emotionally expressive yeah well yeah the

personally to say is that there's a lot more in common than not between all of the boys like their experiences of being teenage boys were very across the board common and where I get the divergent point happens around as well, obviously there's, when we talk about sociology, there's always going to be exceptions to the trend. Um, but generally speaking, the transition from elementary school to high school, yeah, I mean, the pivotal time period started at puberty for like age 13, 14, 15 all of the boys regardless of their level of emotional expression by grade 12 level they all said that was the hardest time period of their lives where the masculine pressures were at their

highest so the masculine pressure to like fit in but how do you fit in it's by restricting your emotions particularly fear and sadness and like physically and mentally tough so athleticism can pretend that but just like being like working out more being physically imposing or tough and not letting things bother you or making it seem like nothing bothers you and not being intimidated by anything so like those pressures were at their zenith at that age and then where we do a separation is i've identified in my research three different categories of responses to those pressures so you had the willingly adhering boy so they when faced with those pressures they're like okay this is how i become a man and maybe i see my father has done the same i don't see anything wrong with

how my father's done things they're like okay this is how i become a man is by following these pressures and doing these things so i'll call that willingly adhering and then i called reluctant adherence which I would say was the main group and reluctant adherence they saw the flaws in adherence to these pressures for instance a lot of them were like oh I wish I had more emotional connection with my male friend I don't think any of my male friends want that like they kind of feel like they're alone in it and they feel like they reluctantly are adhering because they think the benefits of adhering outweigh the cost so the benefit being your feel socially included in your peer group because the desire to sit in with your peer from that developmentally from

that stage is so high and so they're like yeah i kind of critique a bit pressures but at the same time i feel trapped in here i don't know how to get out of there and then the last category which all the boys who were highly emotionally threatened by grade 12 i would categorize them here um which would i call the internal and external resistance to these masculine pressures and essentially in order to resist these masculine pressures they all felt internally that something felt wrong to shut off parts of themselves that like a desire at some point like around age 15 as they were leaving that kind of early high school age they just felt like i don't like how i'm becoming more fake or inauthentic like i just don't like it

and then of course it helps when you have some friends that also are in the same boat or like oh yeah i changed up my friend group or like people accepted me kind of for who i was and And so the key thing here with these boys and being able to kind of step out, kind of reclaim parts of themselves that they had to put on the back burner, especially at school, is having confidence to do so. And that confidence piece was really interesting, is that the boys that had the most confidence to reclaim their emotional parts of themselves also tended to be athletic. and so we can look at like kind of social currencies that's easier for boys and men who are respected for certain masculine qualities like being an athlete is like you kind of have more cachet that if you are also in touch with their emotions then you can kind of more readily break out of the man box so to speak without as much peer judgment kind of like the cooler you

are the more you can kind of like have your own niche thing like if you're a cool person who likes pokemon at high school you might be okay with it if you're a non-popular student who likes pokemon at high school you might get made fun of it yeah i mean it it doesn't look any different than when i was in high school so it's interesting though so just like middle-aged men right a lot of my listeners here are that age range and they're just jumping into the dating world and how do you feel that this is much different being at like let's say 40 you know then I know that there are so many changes when you're a teenager and I'm not I'm not trying to take that away from the experience I guess when I'm it's still very similar in the sense that you know if they have confidence they

can be a little bit different I'm not taking away from the experiences of how hard it is to be a teenager, right? That's the whole effects of growth and emotions and trying to fit in is nobody wants to go back to that time in their life. I don't, I know I don't. And especially for boys, it's such a struggle and it's such a pressure to fit in. But I go back to my audience here who's mostly mid to middle age and, you know, they've been in a relationship for a while And now they're not. And now they're looking to date again. And I find this with a lot of my clients is you said something that was really profound. It's like the guy that's confident, he can step out and be different. He can be his authentic self with without as much judgment. And I know that even with my clients, I'm bringing them on and, you know, confidence is key, you know, but I really, really push being your authentic self. I know it's harder at 15 than it is at 40, but some guys haven't grown since then emotionally. Some men are stuck in that age. Yeah. Yeah. And I would say that it could be harder at 42. It

kind of depends on the trajectory of your life, of where you've been. Like, so for instance, one of the most profound things I personally learned from these teenage boys is that the most emotionally restricted teenage boys all knew when and why they started to restrict their emotions. So they all, I thought some of them would just be like, oh, I've always been this way, this is just who I am, but they all remembered what was going on and why they start to restrict their emotions. And I'm, I've talked to lots of older men about this and most of them can

remember, but a lot of them have forgot. and so i think that the longer you've been disconnected from parts of yourself getting reconnected with them it can be really hard and so when we talk about like yeah teenage boys what does this have to do with middle-aged men is there is actually a lot of research that has done long tool research on teenage boys and their beliefs around masculinity and how that correlates to different health benefits or risks later on in life and so the linkage between your masculinity in high school to later on in life is actually quite linked i think the same dynamics of like we kind of talked a bit before the show about like what are men hearing about masculinity

these days and like as the world is changing like it's easier or simpler to be one of those boys or to be a man who's willingly adhering to like a set of instructions about this is what a man is so i'm gonna go for this and who cares what's in the way this is just what i'm doing that is way more like there's way less internal turmoil than to be in the reluctant adherence feeling like oh i feel like i should be this way i'm not sure where my own authenticity intersects with this i feel like people want me to be this way i feel like i'm trying to be a certain way and i just don't know where i'm landing and then you're not landing in like a confidence zone which does make going back into the dating world way harder and so it's kind of

like like we talk about like doing inner work or how do we find out what our authentic self is and it's like how does our masculine beliefs tie in with that like i think these are very much parallel to middle age like i think that a lot of men who are anti-feminism let's say they will they like the simplicity of what like what the gender roles were on paper at least before feminism came about and kind of changed how the working force works and things like that so yeah there's a lot of self-reflection that men have to do. Yeah. And I love that you correlated the two because they obviously, it starts sometime in our life, our belief systems doesn't just, you know, oh, it's an age we're going through something. It progresses. It starts when we're

really young. And like you said, it usually we emulate our parents and whether it's good or bad, it's just kind of how we were raised and experience life doesn't mean they have to stay the same. And I think that if you do start having that self-reflection and start really getting internalizing with your beliefs and do I really believe that or is that just what my parents projected on me and start asking these questions, I think that's going to definitely help with, you know, life in general, but dating is very specific. So there is this I want to ask you and talk to you about because I feel that a lot of people in my age gap, like late 30s, like even up to like early 60s, people don't know, especially men, their roles. And I know that it's such like nobody should have a particular role. Like, I think there's so much diversity and and how you can show up. But, you know, I had the women that are single and successful and they're like, why can't I just find a man? You know, why can't I just find a guy that's like, open the door for me, do this, like, chase me a little bit. Why is it that I've got to chase them or call them? like you know this dichotomy of like what's weak and what's strong how can we move forward in this

modern age right of society and our roles how can we start to i don't heal it fix it i don't know if that's even a thing but work on it i hope it is because i'm working on a book right now that's really about that topic amazing i think that some of the things that one really important thing to hold is how we move forward is that we have to kind of find this balance between a widespread sociological scale of like what is the role from like in a culture perspective versus what is my personal embodiment role and because i think a huge error happens when it's like oh here's something that works really well for you and maybe even works really well with you and your partner of like having more traditional roles but recognizing that at a collective level

at a societal level like i don't see us going backwards in time of getting kind of more yeah more restricted in that sense and so there's so many things one is that i think what's so hard about the changes that have happened for let's say like 30 to 60 year olds is that like a huge factor of how boys and men have been brought up with masculinity is from our fathers not everything but that huge factors our fathers And it's not even what they implicitly said to us, but so much more is picked up. I think I said the wrong word. It's not so much they implicitly said things, but it's how they just were in the world.

And we take that in and we use that. And so, and I feel like I just went a bit over the place. It's okay. That was a very open-ended question. I'm like, how do we fix this? Yeah, I know. and for here i have so much what's going on my brain right now is like oh i have so many different brains i was like different brains going on different pictures going on of how

to tackle that question but what's the one i started holding on there's a concept of like that i really like that a franciscan father called dr richard roar talks about that in societies there's movements from order disorder to reorder and so if you look at traditional gender roles as being order we're kind of in this and then things have been a bit more disorder but now we're trying to figure out what does reorder look like in this kind of new age where women are working more with like roles are changing like yeah how do we fit that in and So you're going to have people that want to go back to the order and what I heard you say in your question of like women being like, I want a man who knows

himself essentially, and can like constantly like kind of that shiver chivalry. There was a kind of a tone of that in, and then you'll hear some like anti-feminist men rights, activist men being like, oh, that's the double standard. Cause it's like, you didn't want that. Like you've gone rid of that order and cause feminism did all this, blah, blah, and they blame feminism for a lot of this and i think it's just a fundamental i don't know if it's a misunderstanding intentionally or not but the fundamental error of how we're looking at the thing is that if you're looking at the man you want to be

as like here are the rules to follow and like i need to do this or not do this you're not going to be authentically in your body self-led it's not going to be so attractive to a partner if you're doing something for the sake of doing it like that's where we get this idea of the good guy or the nice guy who like does the right things on paper but then get like it feels a sense of entitlement or like i did the right thing so why don't you like me type thing and you can kind of That's a slippery slope, I would argue, like to almost like the in-style culture of feeling like super entitled to women, women sexually in that sense. And so a huge mind shift or paradigm shift is like women want men who know themselves. And how do we get to know ourselves is we have to spend time with ourselves.

So we have little boys that were cut off from their emotions for various reasons. The top three reasons in my research were fear of judging from others, fear of being a burden to others, and fear of experiencing trauma again, meaning those boys had been emotionally close to someone in their lives, but whether through death or just like some of the times it was their best friend suddenly moving away, they're like, I don't want to get emotionally close to someone again because that was painful the first time, is that we have to spend time like being with our inner child so that our inner child knows that her her bodies that our identities as me as brendan is a safe place to be and then from that place

i can move forward with an inner sense of safety and once i have that then i can move in the world with way more confidence that it's like i don't have to be second guessing whether this woman's gonna judge me. Like, if I open the door for her, will she think I'm not a feminist that she couldn't open the door. And then you don't get like, cognitively overthinking. It's like, you know what, I will open this door because I want to open this door. Not because I think this is what I need to do. Or not because I think that she can't open the door for himself. Like

it's just like, maybe and if she doesn't get upset with me, be like, I can open my own door. You're like, Okay, great. I just wanted to do this. But you can kind of just hold your own and being your own and not be so like it's like those teenage boys that are just trying to fit in for the sake of not losing relationship with other people like it's a hard ask but the necessary ask for how can men how can we like hold our own you know gentle respectful way but like not in a laying over um way either and that becomes we have to get that relationship with ourself first it's so profound like you said so many points in there was just like yes yes yes

that's a thousand percent true um you talked about your inner child this is the first time not the first time i've heard it but the first time since doing my own inner work with my with my child and someone that did body work. And it was like so profound, really getting to where I am and how I cope and please and the things that I do. And I love that you also said, you know, you don't want to be that man that just says yes, right? Because that guy becomes resentful. He becomes, like you said, entitled, but he also is like, well, at some point he's not his true authentic self and he's going to explode in some way, whether it's like on you or at you or become you know, all of these things. And so it is so profound. It's so important to become

at peace with who you are and whatever work that looks like for you, then do it. You know, there's no right or wrong, like you said, just because something works for you doesn't mean that that's going to work for me. And I love that there's different modems and there's different people to do that. And yeah, that's huge. And I think the more you know yourself, the more confident you are then you can be yourself and like you don't like me okay i can't change your opinion on that but i'm fine with that totally and if i can use the lord of the rings analogy just because i love lord of the rings huge fan if any of your audience loves lord of the rings is that how i liken it is like if you look at generally an all-male past for the

most part and you look at them be like who is the most authentic or who is like the best masculinity who has who's that who's the kind of your idols or ideals i feel like airborne is going to be up there on most people's lists because like he empowers people around him he's someone that like any most men would want to fall follow into battle but then if you look at the other ones it's like one sam the gardener is actually who tolkien believed was the true hero of the whole story and it's like is Sam's masculinity which like it's often made fun of that he's gay with Frodo things like that but he's his love for Frodo like it's his masculinity less than Aragorn's masculinity just because it's maybe just not as like so large or like it's like no

So Sam is exactly the type of, well, Hobbit, he's exactly the type of male that he needs to be. And I think we get so, we can get locked up in like, oh, I want to be like this man versus like, I want to be like, Sam needs to be the most Sam, Pippin needs to be the most Pippin, Legolas the most Legolas. They don't need to try to be each other. Like we need to, that's why the inner child looking inward, we need to be the most Brendan that we can be. and I don't want anyone else to try to beat Brennan as well and so yeah is there confusing messages around masculinity I think yeah but there's like double standards you can get so lost in looking at all the double standards regardless of what gender you are there's so many double standards out there and I think yeah I think a lot of men are in this limbo state of not

knowing what is best or like for instance let's say like a lot of men use working out as like their therapy or they go through a divorce or break up and then it's like right hit the gym this is what i'm doing one i think getting it i think you can work out and it's a source of embodiment getting connected and i think that's so great but you can also be working out to like disconnect you and i think you have to kind of just be honest with that and be like just constantly evolving in an evolution of like i i don't or how can i have so many different threads of what that's working out is that working out i think has so many physical positive benefits and it's also interesting that there's a meme online or being like a guy will literally do

anything rather than go to therapy so i think that if you just focused on like what are the messages out there but like oh they're judging me for working out now like no working out has been like a life-saving thing for me. It's like, sometimes we need to set aside everything on the internet versus like what actually check in with yourself is working out for you because you love yourself or are you working out? Cause you hate yourself and then work with that. Don't like, I think that was, we give too much power to all these ideas that

are out there and not checking in with ourselves of what actually feels congruent. And of course this gets difficult because the more we've been disconnected from ourselves, the harder it is to know, are we doing this because it's authentic? Are we doing this because we've just been taught that? And I don't think we have to arrive at like this clear answer. Like I played volleyball at a fairly high level. I still to this day, don't know if I played volleyball because I loved it or

because my dad played it and I wanted to make my dad proud, but like kind of those evolve and they kind of intertwine together. So I, yeah, I'm so. Those are some really good points. Sorry, I'm talking for a long time. Back to you. No, no, no. I love that.

I love seeing the passion behind what you do because I want the experts on here. I want the people that are passionate. I want the people that have to share. They're not only like your research, but your opinions too, because that's what the show is about. Yeah, and I think that that's so profound too.

And you said there is like, there's such a polarization between both sexes and i find that like i know this is a little controversial so i won't go down this whole road but you know the me too movement right i feel that since that happened i think it was necessary in a lot of ways but it's also almost masked men's um feelings even more where it's like oh i really can't say anything like i can't voice my opinion or my thoughts or my beliefs because you know i'm just gonna get like emasculated or whatever you know it's gonna be like i can't voice myself so i feel like there's pros and cons to every movement you know

and i think as feminism has evolved to of course we physically can do stuff like the men can do we can open our own door we can do this but to allow like the dance the masculine and the feminine right we've got to embrace one of those energies for to work because two masculinities is competition and too feminine you know energy is just nothing gets done so I feel like there is that need in that dance but getting clear with who you are and and being authentic like that inner child thing was perfect like it's something everybody needs to understand or or at least start doing research a little bit more about that what I wish anytime something like a me too movement happens it's like i think what i wish could happen when anyone expresses hey this is a lived reality for

so many women is that men other people could just like hold the space for their distress and their discomfort instead of being like well here's what it points or like it makes it more complicated it's like that's not what the point initially was again it's just like can we i don't think this will just save so much in relationships and anytime there's distress in the intimate part of the relationship it's like raising kids like can you hold and tolerate your child's emotional distress without making it about you or taking it on because all the women that i've researched or talk to it's not that they don't want men to yeah some women don't want men to approach them like ever to like if you were attracted or wanted to maybe take someone on a date

but a lot of women are like no we just want you to do it in a way that you're aware of your of your body and your presence and what might feel like a safe way to approach or not And so, yeah, I think our ability as a culture to, like, I think why the controversy exists so much between feminism, anti-feminism, things like that, is like, if women felt seen and heard in what they're trying to say, then I think it's easier to also see and hear men and what they're doing. And so like, it's like, I hate when they get like these suffering competitions of like, Oh, here's my pain. Oh, well, here's my pain. And it's like the whataboutisms and things like that. It's like, I really care about women's pain. And that totally impacts and influences the work I do. I totally call what boys and men's pain and what they go through. And I view those as significant in and of themselves, period. And I also see those as like, deeply intertwined. like when i went to leave my job and go do my phd i told my high school students when i was researching and had some great nine girls come up to me and she's like or they're like mr k like why are you just researching boys don't you care about girls and it's like oh i see these things are so interconnected and interrelated and i don't care about lgbtq community as well so

yeah i don't view healing as a scarcity mindset it's like we all need to heal and your healing ultimately i feel like connected to mine and helps me to heal and sometimes that's comforting because someone else's healing can be really empowering for them and it might bring up shame for me but instead of like antagonizing aiming that shame like or getting anger to avoid feeling that shame be like is there something that it might be teaching me and maybe there's a place to grow wow that's that's really um i'm so glad that you brought that up because i've had multiple conversations with just really good friends who in discussion of maybe my own feelings or my own journey it has been like a repellent on some of those things to this person almost like it brought

up something for themselves but it was almost like an attack which it like it was just expressing like what I was going through and doing and so it's really interesting that you say that because I think that there is that's that's there's a lot of learning there right oh why am I why am I reacting this way when my friend's just trying to open up and have conversation and I'm becoming like like that doesn't work for me so it how how does that how do we and you said this with children right I have a 16 year old so I've been through that many years of rearing and I've noticed when my own emotion comes out when she's talking about something and it has ruined the conversation and i didn't realize i was doing it until she actually brought it up to me

like no this is not about you so how do we heal some of that how do we recognize that like oh our own issues are popping up maybe i need to step back and like real like figure this out because it's harming this relationship yeah so there's a term in psychology i really like or i've used this language of like when i get blended with a part of myself so if i get activated or blended i call it it's like when i get kind of tunnel vision on like a situation so like if my daughter is having a hissy fit in a store because i've done therapy but because i've like also spent time identifying what's going on like i know that when i get like when i get emotionally dysregulated so i know what the signs are in my body of what

emotional dysregulation is like and i care more about not making a fuss in public it's like oh I know that I was a child who was like the golden child growing up in my family I didn't want to ever cause my parents distress because I learned to manage their emotions rather than like sitting with my own and so it's like oh when my daughter causes something or like I feel judgment like I don't want people in public to judge me like that's all about me like doing a u-turn about like how is what my child or my partner saying what's that saying about my relationship with myself so like why can we get so hurt our intimate partner relationships when like a woman in a heterosexual relationship let's say like a woman says like oh you're not doing this i think most

men struggle with not being enough and so it's like oh it's pressing that pressure point of like oh but like you missed what i was trying to do or all these things and it's like we can make that so much about the other person rather than like if we can just separate for a moment and like breathe some space into like okay i'm having a reaction that like oh i struggle with not feeling like i'm enough and so when my partner says this it hits that old wound but can i separate my years of experiences as a child not feeling enough from like this one moment and not feeling enough and like this gets into repair work like the part of the reason why i do cold plunges too is that i find um that it helps me unblend and get back to my body um and then from there i can

kind of work work at it and so like you need to kind of identify some like resources in your life that you can get and one of the things working with teenage boys we talk about being hyper aroused versus being hypo aroused hyper aroused as being like activated like kind of fight aggressive energy and then hypo aroused as being kind of really lethargic kind of numbing behavior and in the middle it's called your window of tolerance and that's kind of your optimal zone you're staying but a lot of these boys identified like oh i don't spend any time in the window of tolerance which is optimal it's like either i'm kind of numbing out i'm just and i'm not meaning to shame video games but like i'm just playing video games and i'm not actually working through

my emotions but like when i'm overwhelmed playing video games and then something happens and then immediately activated and the hyper aroused again and so yeah there's all these like psychological concepts and tools to identify it but we talked earlier on the show or before about emotional intelligence is like one of the things and most of the intelligence has like depending on the list three to six different attributes one is being able to identify your emotions one is being able to understand your emotions and one is being able to regulate your emotions and then the other one is able to navigate your emotions with within relation all this kind of you kind of have to start by identifying your emotions and that might just be like a physical feeling in your body of

Like where your emotions are, because emotions are attached to our bodies. It's not like emotions are just in our head. No, our bodies actually really show emotions. So men who are more likely to really be stoic or the, I actually don't like that word, but to really shut down their emotions is they might think that they don't have emotions, but the research shows that men have actually higher body rate activity to emotional stimuli, even though they report and on their faith, it looks like they're not showing emotions.

Like for instance, in a couple of studies, like they've shown different movie clips, each designed to elicit a certain emotional response, so horror, scaredness, sadness, happiness, blah, blah, blah, for most of them, men reported experiencing lower emotional reactions to it verbally, but they set them up with heart rate monitors check their skin conductivity because you can tell your levels of anxiety based on how conductive your skin is and men were consistently in almost all the emotions higher from a physiological response so with getting connected to our bodies like i think embodiments talk about authenticity i think embodiment getting infected with our bodies and ourselves is such a

huge piece of this puzzle yeah i love that and i i love that you said like the first part of emotional intelligence is recognizing what that emotion is, right? Because I think a lot of us maybe have, or let's not say us because I'm a female, but let's stick with the boys and the men here where they've been told numerous times to shut it down, you know, don't cry, you know, be a man, da-da-da, all these things. And so maybe they don't even know what that is for that emotion. You know, well, I'm mad or I'm frustrated, I'm hurt or, you know, whatever that is. And then looking a little bit deeper how to deal with that too so yeah that's just i know it sounds so infantile but i think so many people have have been especially these men have been raised from

such a young age to stuff that down yeah and they just have on average like less emotional practice with with doing this and it's but counter to the point i just is that there was an interesting argument that could be made from my research is that the boys that were highly emotionally restricted so not willing to share their emotions there's a good argument to be made that they were actually really emotionally aware because they were really aware of what their emotional states were so that they could hide it from people being like oh i'm not gonna do this because i might risk showing emotion and for instance the the boy that was the most emotionally restricted like tell me if this actually sounds like he's unaware of the text because i don't think it he is he's like

when my parents got divorced i realized that i need to help my mom and my younger sisters hold it together so like i know that i clammed up my emotions then and i willingly did this and he's like maybe in like 10 15 years i'm gonna like have an outburst of anger at something really small that i know wasn't actually about the thing but it's because i've restricted my emotions and he like he's like i and he longed for like he's like i wish i wasn't this self-aware he's like it'd be nice wouldn't just be nice to be ignorant it's like totally man sometimes like therapy like why the heck do therapy like isn't it wasn't kind of blissfully unaware of how life oh to be that young again right yeah i also don't want to dig into the narrative that boys

are on general just less emotionally intelligent i think there's an area of other emotional intelligence that maybe is weaker or less practice but i think that even the highly emotionally restricted are still very like aware of their emotions but there is sometimes the learning curve is like how do i then what you actually do with them or like because kind of right now the default mode is like ignore them or suppress them yeah that doesn't do anybody um good especially the person that's doing that so well I mean there's so much research there's so many like I could talk to you for days I love all of this stuff I really do hope that this resonated with you all here and you were able to take some pieces because I definitely do this is like my

PhD the podcast I'm like okay because I get to learn from everybody and especially you like I really appreciate that. And I know people here are as well, are constantly learning, right? I think anybody that jumps on a podcast and wants to know about relationships and dating and sex and all like, oh, let's talk, you know, let's find more about like how I can be better, how I can show up better in relationships. So thank you again for being on today's show. I do have one last question for you that is I ask all my guests. So it's just a little bit personal, but what was one of your favorite dates and what was it my favorite dates oh I joke about this being my favorite date but I'm still disappointed because it was my first date with my wife which

I recreated but I just feel like the bar went if my very first date I ever did was my favorite and the best yeah I don't love that but we went canoeing it's called Wigeon Creek near Vancouver and it's beautiful canoeing to a waterfall and have packed a lunch and just yeah being outside in nature but you have a time to talk but you're doing an activity and then we saw some very classic canadian beavers swimming and doing all these things yeah it was just like a day adventure like that that was probably my yeah we've done more day adventures to defend myself there but It's so great. I thank you for sharing that.

Believe it or not, a lot of people's first date are their favorites. So don't feel left out. And also because you had a sense of adventure connection, you had all the good feels, right? There was a lot of things going on to create this. I mean, that's just from what I've experienced and what I tell my clients. And that was like, no, don't beat yourself up. That was like perfect. and I think people here really love hearing what those dates are because they're like well

either different ideas or like what was it about it that made it so great for you so yeah so if I could just do the u-turn back demonstrate the u-turn like oh yeah I prefaced all that because I felt like a sense of shame that like oh I don't want it to seem like I gave up pursuing my wife after the first date type thing and that's just been downhill from there like no that actually hasn't been the case for sure in our 10-year marriage there's been time periods where i've neglected dates more than other times but i that was what was going on for me it's like oh i don't want to see like i don't care about my wife oh my gosh that's wonderful i love that date so you should you guys i'm sure love it as well yeah no shame you know well and also where can people

find more um information about you follow you on social media yeah so remasculine.com i'm kind of like a play on words of like regarding masculinity but yeah remasculine.com has links i've stayed tiktok and instagram i'm most prominent on i have lots of plans for 2024 yeah some webinars a book in the works so nothing to write home about yet in 2024 hopefully there'll be a lot more different types of media as well i love that well go find him on tiktok and instagram and then i'm sure you're going to post on there when you launch all of your webinars and launch your book so it'll be good for everybody to know where to find you so again thank you so much for being on the show. And it was so great to learn from you. Thank you so much, Celeste.

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Thank you.