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I'm Alex Sharfman.
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Welcome to the Masculine Containment Podcast.
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In this episode, I want to speak to the men who want to get started in this work, who know that there's this pattern of trigger, escalation, rupture, withdraw, and then an attempt at repair in their relationships, in your relationship.
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And I want to give you the first step towards masculine containment.
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And I spent like the last couple hours working on an outline for this because...
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My goal is to help as many men step into this work as possible.
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Because I've seen the results of what happens.
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I've seen men completely transform their relationships, not just with their partners, with their wives, with their girlfriends, but I've seen them transform their relationships with their kids, with their families, with their parents, with the people around them, with the people that they work with.
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I've seen men step into an entirely new level of capacity
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being able to do more, get more done, have more energy, have more available to them just because they're in this place of containment and they understand this concept and they start working towards this concept.
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And honestly, I want to help you move towards this because there is no perfection in this work.
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There's only progress.
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But as men, when we start to make progress, just make progress, just move in the direction of containment and
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we can start seeing things in our lives change.
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We can start seeing things in our relationships change.
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We can start seeing things in our relationship with ourselves change.
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Before I found this work, I was in a really frustrating place.
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I'll share with you what I share with men coming into the brotherhood.
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I've been with my wife, Katie, for 22 years.
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And we've been married for 20.
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And she is my everything.
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I love her more than anything.
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She is the most important person in my world.
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And it's been like that literally from the day we met.
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I knew she was the one for me the day we met.
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And years ago, she shared with me in a quiet moment that she didn't feel seen.
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She didn't feel heard.
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She didn't feel safe.
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And if something didn't change, she couldn't do this anymore.
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Honestly, I was all the types of emotions in that moment.
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I was upset and frustrated and a little irritated, maybe even angry, because my first thought was defensiveness.
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Like, I see you.
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I hear you.
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I don't understand what this means.
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And I had all kinds of reactions.
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But in that moment...
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Thank God I was able to slow things down and listen to her and hear her.
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And I knew it was serious.
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It was like there was divine intervention in that moment because so many times throughout our relationship when she communicated something to me, I reacted or I defended or I explained it away with logic or I told her why she shouldn't feel that way.
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But in this moment, I knew it was important and I knew I had to listen.
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And I let her explain what was going on and how she felt and how she didn't feel safe and how she was waiting for my next reaction and how her nervous system was always stimulated and always felt scared and frustrated.
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And I'm so glad that I listened.
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because it's changed everything in my life.
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Our relationship's in the best place it's ever been.
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I feel like I, as a person, am in the best place I've ever been.
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I feel like I have more capacity, more awareness, more energy than I've ever had in my life.
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And it was because I listened and really heard her and
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here's what I've come to understand about this work of masculine containment.
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And here's why I'm so glad that I listened to her because when she said this, I asked her, okay, like, what do I need to do?
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And her answer was, I don't know.
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But something needs to change.
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And what I've learned was the solution is,
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or was, and has been, and still is, for me to step into a place of containment, for me to step into a place where I'm feeling my feelings, but I'm not reacting to them, for me to step into a place where I see reality for what it is, not this triggered reaction where I'm either exploding and bringing way too much energy or imploding and pulling all my energy away.
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As men, we do one or the other.
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If you can relate to that, then this podcast is for you.
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And if you can relate to being in a relationship where you feel her slipping away, where it doesn't feel as close, it doesn't feel as connected, she doesn't feel as present, it's not as much fun, it's not as playful, maybe intimacy isn't what it used to be, or it feels like obligation or feels rushed, or maybe it's just not there as much as it is, or it's not there at all, then this podcast is for you.
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This episode is for you.
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This recording's for you.
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because I want to help you start moving in the direction of understanding how to create emotional safety and security for your partner, but just as importantly, how to create an emotional safety and security for yourself.
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Because as men, when we get into this place of trigger, and there's a trigger present, and we react as though there's violence, when we implode or explode, when we react as though there's a threat, when we explode or implode, what we have to understand is that we as men in that moment don't feel safe.
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And every time we escalate and cause rupture, and then there's a withdrawal period, and then we come back and try and repair, not only are we traumatizing the person that we're with, whether it's our partner or someone else, our child, somebody at work, someone who works for us or with us, we're also traumatizing ourselves and our inner child and reinforcing this belief, this behavior pattern that shows us we're not safe.
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and shows us we're not okay.
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And when we can step into a place when there's a trigger present, and instead of reacting, we can respond, and we can slow things down, everything in our lives changes.
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We create a level of presence and awareness and security for ourselves that maybe we've never felt before.
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And when we create that for ourselves, we create emotional safety and security for the people around us in a way that they will communicate with us more.
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They will share with us more.
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They'll be more transparent with us.
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They'll be more real with us.
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They'll share what's really going on with us because they don't have a fear that we're going to step out of the moment, lose presence, and create that feeling of threat.
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And just so it's really clear, whether we explode and we bring too much energy to the situation or we implode and we pull away, both create a feeling of threat.
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One creates a feeling of danger, one creates a feeling of abandonment, both are a feeling of threat.
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And so the more that we can stop doing that for the people around us and the more we can stop doing that for us, the more we step into who we really are and our full capacity as men.
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Now the first step,
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in understanding this work, the first step in moving towards containment is to acknowledge that it's happening.
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It's to acknowledge that as men, as a man,
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You get triggered when emotions are present, or you get triggered when something's going on around outside of you, and you get to this place where there is a central nervous system response.
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It's an almost automatic response.
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It happens before we're thinking about it.
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Like, I don't think anyone listening to this podcast wants to yell at people, and wants to scare people, and wants to make people feel uncomfortable, and wants to make the people around us not communicate as much with us, and shut down, and pull away, and not feel close to us.
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Like, that's not a want problem.
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That's not something any of us would ever want.
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And we do this because this is conditioning and training and the example that we've seen throughout our lifetimes.
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If you're one of the men that explodes or implodes, just think back to who modeled that for you.
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Who did you see doing that?
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And even if you can't think of the person is so present in our society, I mean, it's in movies and sitcoms and like the example of the man exploding or pulling away and withdrawing is like seen as normal.
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And it's not normal.
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It's normalized.
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It's become just this like, this is how we are, but it's not how we need to be.
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It's not how we have to be.
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So first, acknowledging that when there's a trigger present, we have a reaction is the first step in moving towards containment.
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It's the first step in resolving this.
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It's saying like, okay, I know I have triggers.
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And I know that every trigger is an opportunity.
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And not to explode or implode, but to understand myself better, to slow things down, to behave in a different way, to react in a different way.
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And once we have this acknowledgement, once we admit that it's there, the second thing to start doing, like the steps towards masculine containment is...
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to increase our awareness to these triggers to start really going through the day and seeing where do you feel a body response that causes you to make to to want to have a reaction where do you feel that because here's what happens for all the men i've talked to so far we feel it in our body first
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When there's a trigger present, we feel energy in our body.
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We feel reaction in our body.
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And then we react with words or with a lack of words or with volume or a lack of volume.
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We explode or we implode.
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It's first in our body.
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And so going through our day and feeling for that trigger, feeling for that sensation can really help us start to understand what's going on for us and can help us start to understand where we're triggered, why we're triggered, and how often we are.
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So many of us as men have never had this pointed out to us.
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I've never had the opportunity to do this.
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No one's ever said like, hey, really pay attention to where you're triggered.
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I know for a lot of my life, I went through the day.
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Sometimes triggered in one moment, upset in another moment, moving through things, not really feeling my feelings, suppressing them, doing what I had to do, doing what I needed to do, pushing through my emotions.
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And when we slow things down and increase awareness as to how often we're triggered, we start really understanding what's going on for us.
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And then the next step is, as we acknowledge there's an issue and increase awareness, we start recognizing that in the moment of trigger, we have choice.
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We can actually slow down and not repress our emotions, not suppress our emotions, not ignore that they're there.
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Those will come out sideways later.
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They always do.
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But instead, slow things down and really feel what's going on for us.
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Take a deep breath.
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Like...
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As you move into this work, trigger should equal take a deep breath.
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Because that body reaction we're having, that body reaction that is responding as though there's a threat present, is most of the time, most of the time, not from the present moment.
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Now, that's not to say that there's times in our lives where we don't encounter a physical threat, where we don't encounter a real threat.
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That happens.
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And in those moments, we hope our bodies are going to carry us through like some course of action that's going to get us out of that threat to fight, flight, you know, fight or flight and get out of there.
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But this survival response of trigger equals fight or flight or fawn or freeze is a response that we can actually slow down and start training.
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And it's interesting because this doesn't get shared in modern psychology.
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This doesn't get shared by therapists.
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This doesn't get shared in other work that we do as men.
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I know because I've done so much work around it.
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I've done so much work before it.
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And no one ever said, hey, you can slow things down and start training this trigger.
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But once I did, everything in my life changed.
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And so here's what I would do.
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I would slow things down when I felt the trigger present.
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Okay.
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breathe into my body, feel my feet on the ground, know that I'm there, register that there's not an actual threat that I need to react to, there's nothing that I need to do immediately, slow is fast and fast is slow when it comes to doing this work, and then I feel what's coming up for me.
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Like what's really coming up?
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Because sometimes the littlest thing, somebody saying something the wrong way, especially my wife or one of my kids, you know, can set me off and can make me want to have a reaction, can make me want to raise my voice or run away from the situation and get out of the room and withdraw myself from the situation.
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And when I slow things down, I often start realizing and recognizing that, yes, hey, this is a reaction from another time.
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You know, one of the common things that would happen to me in my relationship is when my wife would correct me or direct me.
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Like so many men see this as disrespect.
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But what was happening on my wife's side is my wife is hypervigilant.
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She's gone through a lifetime of abuse.
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And when I say a lifetime of abuse, she had abuse throughout her lifetime.
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Yeah.
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And it's hard to say it in a lot of ways.
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I acted in a way that was violent towards her so many times in our relationship, not physically, but emotionally and energetically yelling and screaming or withdrawing your energy.
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That's energetic violence.
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My wife, because of what happened in her childhood, because of things that happened to her throughout her life, arrived in our relationship in a state of hypervigilance and wanting to make sure everything would go okay and wanting to make sure things didn't go wrong and wanting to make sure we didn't get off track.
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And so I would be doing something and she would either correct, tell me I was doing it wrong, or direct, tell me what I should do.
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Like simple things like pulling into a parking lot, she would say, hey, you should park there.
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And I would think, and here's what would happen.
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I would get triggered and I would get defensive towards her.
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Like, I know how to drive.
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I don't need you to tell me where to park.
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And when I slowed things down in this specific situation and I really slowed things down and breathed and listened to my body,
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what my body was telling me was, she doesn't trust you.
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And what my reaction was is she doesn't respect you.
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She doesn't trust you.
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She doesn't think you can drive.
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She doesn't think you can park.
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She thinks you're incompetent.
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All of these beliefs would come up that were simply untrue.
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My wife doesn't think any of those things.
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She's just hypervigilant, protecting herself from her own life experience.
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And so when I was able to slow things down, not suppress, not repress my emotions, but actually feel them,
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Often, the emotions that I had coming up, the feelings that I had coming up, the reaction that I had coming up was actually unreasonable.
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Like that feeling of she's disrespecting me, she's doing this, she's doing that.
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That was a feeling from my childhood of being corrected and directed when I was young.
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That was a feeling of being treated like a child.
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My wife wasn't trying to do any of those things.
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She was innocently saying like, hey, park there just because she's trying to get to the next step.
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She's hypervigilant.
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Yeah.
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And often I found out that my reactions were just not reasonable, especially with my wife and man, so many times with my kids.
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There's so many times where my kids would say something innocent or ask a question that would trigger me.
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And I would have a reaction and it would make all kinds of noise in the relationship.
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And all they were doing was trying to figure something out.
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You know, the irony is when I was a kid, the same thing would happen to me.
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See if you can relate.
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I was the type of kid that I would ask a question that was sincere, that I was actually trying to figure out the answer to and adults around me thought I was trying to make things difficult for them or be a smart ass or make it throw them off and I wasn't.
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I was just trying to understand.
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That happened to me so many times as a child and then I was doing the same things to my kids.
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Kids, when they would ask a question
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I would react.
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I would make it noisy.
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I'd make it worse for them.
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And oftentimes, I'm pretty sure they forgot the question they had because there was such a big reaction for me.
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And so when I slowed things down and really started breathing into what my kids would say and pausing and looking them in the eyes so I could see their innocence and the reality of who they are and the fact that they're not trying to throw me off and I shouldn't have this triggered reaction, things got so much easier for me.
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Now, that being said, sometimes I would have a triggered response and then I'd slow things down and I would say, you know what, this is actually kind of reasonable.
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Like I'm having a big, big trigger, but this is not behavior that's okay.
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Like it's not okay what my kid just did.
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It's not okay how my wife's behaving or it's not okay how she responded.
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And that would be a place where I could put a boundary in place.
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Now, early in this work, what you're just trying to do is feel what's coming up for you and understand what's actually happening so you can slow down.
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And instead of reacting, instead of overreacting, you can respond and see reality for what it is.
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Now, here's the easiest place to start with this work.
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And I'll explain why this is easy.
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The easiest place to start is when you're on your own and by yourself.
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When you're not with your partner, when you're not with your kids, the easiest place, like the low hanging fruit here, the place where you can start rewiring your nervous system and show yourself that you're safe and show yourself you don't have to react.
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Use the triggers on your own as an opportunity to train in this masculine martial art of masculine containment.
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And the reason I call it a martial art is we're never going to be perfect at this.
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It's something you train.
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It's something you get better at.
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It's something through repetitions that you actually start to acquire competence at and you get like to the point where it's changing your life because you're more present.
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Now, relationally, that's a hard place to start.
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It's difficult with triggers in relationships.
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The more you can acknowledge them, the more you can be aware of them, the better.
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But the place where you can really change things and start rewiring your nervous system is when you're alone and when you get triggered on your own.
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You know, I used to joke with people that I could be having a great day, get a ton of stuff done in the morning.
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Everything would be going great.
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But if I walked in my office and there was an envelope from the IRS, literally just an envelope from the IRS, had so many issues with taxes throughout my life.
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I would look at it and I'd get heart palpitations and I'd start breathing more shallowly and it would actually cause a reaction in me.
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Or when I'm driving, if somebody cuts me off, that's a dangerous situation when somebody cuts me off.
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But before I understood masculine containment, I'd get cut off and then I'd start behaving in a way that made the whole situation even more dangerous.
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I'm screaming, I'm yelling.
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Sometimes I would even accelerate and do really crazy things in a car that made no sense.
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And so the easiest place to start understanding your triggers is throughout the day on your own.
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Just start paying attention to your body.
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What is it that brings up sensation, brings up excess energy in your body?
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In the case of the IRS letter, it's one of those things like seeing the letter, feeling the trigger, and then feeling what's really going on for you.
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You know, if I was to do that with an IRS letter...
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What I would feel is I'd look at the IRS letter, and I'd remember when I was in my 20s, and I got in trouble with the IRS, and I had a tax lien.
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And I remember how expensive it was and how hard it was to get out of it.
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And I thought I was never gonna be able to pay it off.
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And it felt like this massive payment I was making for absolutely nothing.
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You know, I was writing multi-thousand dollar checks to the IRS every month, and I wasn't getting anything for it.
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And it was taking so much of my money.
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It was making it hard for me to live, to grow my business, to do anything else.
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And I was like,
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And so when I see a letter from the IRS, if I really slow things down, it feels like a threat.
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You know, ironically, it could be a rebate check.
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It could be any type of a notice.
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But when I slow things down, I realize it's not that I'm reacting to the present.
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I'm reacting to my entire history with those three initials, IRS.
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Same thing in the car.
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I'm not reacting to the present.
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When somebody cuts me off, I'm reacting to a feeling of danger.
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I'm reacting to, you know, wanting to get upset with them, wanting to get frustrated with them.
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And what I'm really doing, and this is super challenging, is I'm repeating a pattern from my childhood.
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When I was a little kid, I spent a lot of time with my dad.
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My dad had three ways of acting in the world.
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He was either rage, silence, or punitive teasing.
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And when somebody cut him off, they would get rage.
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And my dad would yell and scream and accelerate and pull up next to people and then go cut them off and get retribution all while I was in the car as a child.
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And now as an adult, I recognize that as traumatic behavior, that I was in the presence of traumatic behavior, that I was being traumatized in those moments.
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But that's what my nervous system grew up with.
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That's what's familiar to me.
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So as an adult, when somebody would cut me off, I would do the exact same thing, even though it was dangerous, even though it doesn't make sense.
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Even though it's really like the worst way to respond, even though it drained my capacity, took me out of the moment, you know, I could have been thinking about something productive and if somebody cut me off, then I would totally lose it and for the next 10 or 15 minutes, I was all reactive, adrenaline dump, my body was activated just because somebody cut me off.
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And so...
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When I was early in this work, when somebody would cut me off or when I'd see an envelope like that, I would feel the feeling and like actually feel what's coming up for me.
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And when somebody would cut me off, I would feel the feelings of rage and anger and like literally wanting to hurt them.
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If I'm honest, that's what was coming up.
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And I think for most people, if you're honest, you're gonna find that there's some unreasonable feelings coming up, some unreasonable things coming up that really don't make sense.
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It's wiring from a different time.
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It's wiring that is actually like not the right, not properly wired in your body.
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It's a survival response that is overreactive and has been miswired, misconditioned, put into your body in the wrong way.
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And so when you do get it cut off and you start feeling those feelings, it's an excellent time to breathe, slow things down, and open space between the trigger and your reaction.
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And these days, when somebody cuts me off, actually these days, when somebody cuts me off, a lot of the time, it barely registers, but that was trained over a long period of time.
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At the beginning, somebody would cut me off, and I'd go to get irritated, and I'd have to breathe and calm down, and I'd still feel the reaction in my body, and I'd still have the adrenaline dump in my low back, and I'd still feel like my body was all activated.
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And then over time, it got to the point where somebody would cut me off and the trigger wasn't as strong and the body reaction wasn't as strong.
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And then over time, it got to the point where somebody cut me off and like I wasn't reacting really at all.
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And I was kind of feeling sorry for them because they're driving in a way that's going to get them in trouble or make them have an accident.
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And now when somebody cuts me off, it's like it registers.
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I just got cut off, but there's no body response anymore because I've trained over and over and over again, slowing down.
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acknowledging the trigger, really understanding this error, slowing down again, and feeling what's coming up for me and letting my feelings come through.
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Not suppressing, not repressing, not stuffing things down, not exploding, not imploding, but actually feeling.
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And when we're on, it's one of the best times to do this.
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Because here's what I want you to know.
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Your life doesn't have to be this way.
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Your life doesn't have to be a series of
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focused and grounded times in between triggers.
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If you start training the trigger, you can get to the point where it doesn't register anymore, where you're not triggered as often, where it's not happening for you as much.
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And by training triggers, especially on your own, by training,
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paying attention to your body and letting the feelings come through, you start training your capacity that when you're in relationship with someone, when it's a comment from your wife or a comment from your kids or from somebody around you, that same training that you do on your own carries over to being in containment with the people around you and being safer for the people around you and safer for yourself.
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Like this is work we do for us, not for them.
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This is work we do for us.
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They benefit.
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Everyone around us benefits.
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And when you train your capacity and you rewire, recondition your nervous system, you end up in a place where you're more grounded and you're more present and you're more in the moment here and now.
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And here's how that carries over into our lives and changes everything.
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As men...
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I'll personalize this.
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As a man, for so much of my life, I was in between these triggered states where I was going up into a survival mechanism or a survival response and then coming back down to somewhat normal and then back up into a survival response.
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And if I had a lot going on, I had so many triggers that I was going up into a survival response and I wasn't coming all the way out of it and staying there.
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And so I was just constantly in a survival response.
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Right.
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And at 53 years old, when I look back at my life with hindsight, it's 2020.
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You can see a lot.
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I know that so much of my life I was making decisions from a place of reaction.
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I was making decisions from a place of, honestly, in a lot of cases, desperation.
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Because I was just doing what I had to do to get to the next decision.
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And now I understand that when I slow things down, as I've increased my capacity, as I'm more present and I'm more in the room, my decision-making has increased.
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I rarely make decisions from a place outside of presence and grounding and being in my body.
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I actually feel the decisions.
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You know how they say, trust your gut?
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Well, so many of us are in this spiral of reaction and reactivity and escalation
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that we don't even feel our gut.
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We don't even feel our body.
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We're all up here cognitively trying to work things out.
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But when you slow things down and you get out of this pattern of trigger, you actually cannot just feel your gut.
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You can actually trust your gut.
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You can trust your body to help you navigate the world.
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You know, I share with people that these days, if Katie walks into my office and she says, hey, Alex, do you want to?
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So often, before she says what the thing is, my body's already a yes or no.
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And so often, that's the answer for me because my body is telling me whether that's the right thing for me or not.
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There is deep wisdom in our bodies.
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I've learned this from the shamans that I've worked with.
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There is deep wisdom in our bodies.
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Our bodies are connected to our destiny.
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Our bodies are connected to what we should be doing in the world.
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Our bodies are connected to our path and to the energetics of who we are.
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And when we start practicing masculine containment and we get into our bodies and we are embodied, we can trust our bodies to be like a GPS system that helps us navigate the world.
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We can actually feel our way through situations instead of just using logic and decision making.
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We can use a combination of both.
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But for me, so often these days, it's the feeling that I get that creates the decision.
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And these days, now that I've practiced containment for years and I'm training this work and I'm working with other men, it is something that I think about all the time.
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So often I go to do something and I actually slow down and think like, hey, is this really what I should be doing right now?
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It's gotten me out of addictive behaviors.
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It's gotten me out of compulsive behaviors.
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It's gotten me out of doing things that aren't that good for me.
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It's gotten me out of procrastination.
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So much of what I do today happens efficiently and effectively.
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in a way that's so much better than it used to be because I'm grounded and I'm present.
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And when you're in your body, that's the best place to make decisions from.
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When you're in your body, that's the best place to create from.
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If you're an entrepreneur, you're in a creative world.
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Regardless of what your business does, you are a creative person if you're an entrepreneur.
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And by getting in your body, you unlock a capacity for creativity and connectedness to what you wanna do that's extraordinary.
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I would not be doing the work that I'm doing today without being in my body and being present and grounded like I am today.
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I wouldn't have found the, it's really an opposite way to say it, the work wouldn't have found me like it did if I wasn't in my body and if I wasn't aware and if I wasn't paying attention.
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And when I say the work wouldn't have found me, I'll explain that in my next podcast.
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I'm actually gonna give
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a Brotherhood update and share the story of how I came to run this organization called The Brotherhood, because so many have asked me about it and have asked me how it is and how it's doing.
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And so I'm going to share that in a podcast.
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But this work really did find me.
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And the way that it found me was by me trusting my gut and sharing what I was learning and sharing what I saw in the world and jumping on a call with some guys that I thought I could help.
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And it created this thing called the brotherhood that cognitively, consciously, like logically, I don't think I ever would have created.
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And it's the most rewarding and the most exciting thing I've ever done.
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And prior to that, I was feeling stuck and I was feeling like every day was kind of a slog and I was kind of running through molasses.
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And yes, I was financially successful and yes, I was doing what other people would think as well, but I wasn't having fun and I wasn't excited about it.
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And today I'm more excited about this than probably anything I've ever done.
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And the excitement just keeps increasing.
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And I got there through trusting my body constantly.
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But the reason I can trust my body is because I stepped into containment.
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I trained the trigger.
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I slowed things down, felt my feelings.
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And now I can actually feel what's going on for me in the world.
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If you relate to anything that I've shared in this podcast and you're interested in stepping into this work and going further than just this first step, I'd be honored to work with you.
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We are in open interviews right now for our fourth container of The Brotherhood.
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You can go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com, register for an interview, jump on a live call with me.
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It'd be an honor to meet you and it'd be a privilege to walk this path with you.
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Thebrotherhoodsociety.com.
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I look forward to meeting you in person.
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I'm Alex Sharfman.
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Welcome to the Masculine Containment Podcast.
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In this episode, I want to speak to the men who want to get started in this work, who know that there's this pattern of trigger, escalation, rupture, withdraw, and then an attempt at repair in their relationships, in your relationship.
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And I want to give you the first step towards masculine containment.
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And I spent like the last couple hours working on an outline for this because...
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My goal is to help as many men step into this work as possible.
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Because I've seen the results of what happens.
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I've seen men completely transform their relationships, not just with their partners, with their wives, with their girlfriends, but I've seen them transform their relationships with their kids, with their families, with their parents, with the people around them, with the people that they work with.
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I've seen men step into an entirely new level of capacity
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being able to do more, get more done, have more energy, have more available to them just because they're in this place of containment and they understand this concept and they start working towards this concept.
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And honestly, I want to help you move towards this because there is no perfection in this work.
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There's only progress.
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But as men, when we start to make progress, just make progress, just move in the direction of containment and
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we can start seeing things in our lives change.
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We can start seeing things in our relationships change.
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We can start seeing things in our relationship with ourselves change.
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Before I found this work, I was in a really frustrating place.
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I'll share with you what I share with men coming into the brotherhood.
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I've been with my wife, Katie, for 22 years.
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And we've been married for 20.
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And she is my everything.
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I love her more than anything.
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She is the most important person in my world.
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And it's been like that literally from the day we met.
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I knew she was the one for me the day we met.
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And years ago, she shared with me in a quiet moment that she didn't feel seen.
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She didn't feel heard.
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She didn't feel safe.
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And if something didn't change, she couldn't do this anymore.
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Honestly, I was all the types of emotions in that moment.
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I was upset and frustrated and a little irritated, maybe even angry, because my first thought was defensiveness.
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Like, I see you.
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I hear you.
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I don't understand what this means.
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And I had all kinds of reactions.
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But in that moment...
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Thank God I was able to slow things down and listen to her and hear her.
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And I knew it was serious.
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It was like there was divine intervention in that moment because so many times throughout our relationship when she communicated something to me, I reacted or I defended or I explained it away with logic or I told her why she shouldn't feel that way.
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But in this moment, I knew it was important and I knew I had to listen.
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And I let her explain what was going on and how she felt and how she didn't feel safe and how she was waiting for my next reaction and how her nervous system was always stimulated and always felt scared and frustrated.
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And I'm so glad that I listened.
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because it's changed everything in my life.
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Our relationship's in the best place it's ever been.
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I feel like I, as a person, am in the best place I've ever been.
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I feel like I have more capacity, more awareness, more energy than I've ever had in my life.
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And it was because I listened and really heard her and
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here's what I've come to understand about this work of masculine containment.
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And here's why I'm so glad that I listened to her because when she said this, I asked her, okay, like, what do I need to do?
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And her answer was, I don't know.
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But something needs to change.
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And what I've learned was the solution is,
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or was, and has been, and still is, for me to step into a place of containment, for me to step into a place where I'm feeling my feelings, but I'm not reacting to them, for me to step into a place where I see reality for what it is, not this triggered reaction where I'm either exploding and bringing way too much energy or imploding and pulling all my energy away.
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As men, we do one or the other.
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If you can relate to that, then this podcast is for you.
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And if you can relate to being in a relationship where you feel her slipping away, where it doesn't feel as close, it doesn't feel as connected, she doesn't feel as present, it's not as much fun, it's not as playful, maybe intimacy isn't what it used to be, or it feels like obligation or feels rushed, or maybe it's just not there as much as it is, or it's not there at all, then this podcast is for you.
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This episode is for you.
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This recording's for you.
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because I want to help you start moving in the direction of understanding how to create emotional safety and security for your partner, but just as importantly, how to create an emotional safety and security for yourself.
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Because as men, when we get into this place of trigger, and there's a trigger present, and we react as though there's violence, when we implode or explode, when we react as though there's a threat, when we explode or implode, what we have to understand is that we as men in that moment don't feel safe.
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And every time we escalate and cause rupture, and then there's a withdrawal period, and then we come back and try and repair, not only are we traumatizing the person that we're with, whether it's our partner or someone else, our child, somebody at work, someone who works for us or with us, we're also traumatizing ourselves and our inner child and reinforcing this belief, this behavior pattern that shows us we're not safe.
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and shows us we're not okay.
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And when we can step into a place when there's a trigger present, and instead of reacting, we can respond, and we can slow things down, everything in our lives changes.
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We create a level of presence and awareness and security for ourselves that maybe we've never felt before.
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And when we create that for ourselves, we create emotional safety and security for the people around us in a way that they will communicate with us more.
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They will share with us more.
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They'll be more transparent with us.
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They'll be more real with us.
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They'll share what's really going on with us because they don't have a fear that we're going to step out of the moment, lose presence, and create that feeling of threat.
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And just so it's really clear, whether we explode and we bring too much energy to the situation or we implode and we pull away, both create a feeling of threat.
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One creates a feeling of danger, one creates a feeling of abandonment, both are a feeling of threat.
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And so the more that we can stop doing that for the people around us and the more we can stop doing that for us, the more we step into who we really are and our full capacity as men.
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Now the first step,
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in understanding this work, the first step in moving towards containment is to acknowledge that it's happening.
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It's to acknowledge that as men, as a man,
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You get triggered when emotions are present, or you get triggered when something's going on around outside of you, and you get to this place where there is a central nervous system response.
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It's an almost automatic response.
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It happens before we're thinking about it.
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Like, I don't think anyone listening to this podcast wants to yell at people, and wants to scare people, and wants to make people feel uncomfortable, and wants to make the people around us not communicate as much with us, and shut down, and pull away, and not feel close to us.
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Like, that's not a want problem.
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That's not something any of us would ever want.
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And we do this because this is conditioning and training and the example that we've seen throughout our lifetimes.
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If you're one of the men that explodes or implodes, just think back to who modeled that for you.
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Who did you see doing that?
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And even if you can't think of the person is so present in our society, I mean, it's in movies and sitcoms and like the example of the man exploding or pulling away and withdrawing is like seen as normal.
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And it's not normal.
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It's normalized.
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It's become just this like, this is how we are, but it's not how we need to be.
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It's not how we have to be.
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So first, acknowledging that when there's a trigger present, we have a reaction is the first step in moving towards containment.
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It's the first step in resolving this.
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It's saying like, okay, I know I have triggers.
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And I know that every trigger is an opportunity.
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And not to explode or implode, but to understand myself better, to slow things down, to behave in a different way, to react in a different way.
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And once we have this acknowledgement, once we admit that it's there, the second thing to start doing, like the steps towards masculine containment is...
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to increase our awareness to these triggers to start really going through the day and seeing where do you feel a body response that causes you to make to to want to have a reaction where do you feel that because here's what happens for all the men i've talked to so far we feel it in our body first
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When there's a trigger present, we feel energy in our body.
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We feel reaction in our body.
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And then we react with words or with a lack of words or with volume or a lack of volume.
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We explode or we implode.
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It's first in our body.
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And so going through our day and feeling for that trigger, feeling for that sensation can really help us start to understand what's going on for us and can help us start to understand where we're triggered, why we're triggered, and how often we are.
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So many of us as men have never had this pointed out to us.
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I've never had the opportunity to do this.
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No one's ever said like, hey, really pay attention to where you're triggered.
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I know for a lot of my life, I went through the day.
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Sometimes triggered in one moment, upset in another moment, moving through things, not really feeling my feelings, suppressing them, doing what I had to do, doing what I needed to do, pushing through my emotions.
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And when we slow things down and increase awareness as to how often we're triggered, we start really understanding what's going on for us.
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And then the next step is, as we acknowledge there's an issue and increase awareness, we start recognizing that in the moment of trigger, we have choice.
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We can actually slow down and not repress our emotions, not suppress our emotions, not ignore that they're there.
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Those will come out sideways later.
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They always do.
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But instead, slow things down and really feel what's going on for us.
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Take a deep breath.
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Like...
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As you move into this work, trigger should equal take a deep breath.
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Because that body reaction we're having, that body reaction that is responding as though there's a threat present, is most of the time, most of the time, not from the present moment.
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Now, that's not to say that there's times in our lives where we don't encounter a physical threat, where we don't encounter a real threat.
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That happens.
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And in those moments, we hope our bodies are going to carry us through like some course of action that's going to get us out of that threat to fight, flight, you know, fight or flight and get out of there.
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But this survival response of trigger equals fight or flight or fawn or freeze is a response that we can actually slow down and start training.
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And it's interesting because this doesn't get shared in modern psychology.
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This doesn't get shared by therapists.
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This doesn't get shared in other work that we do as men.
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I know because I've done so much work around it.
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I've done so much work before it.
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And no one ever said, hey, you can slow things down and start training this trigger.
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But once I did, everything in my life changed.
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And so here's what I would do.
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I would slow things down when I felt the trigger present.
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Okay.
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breathe into my body, feel my feet on the ground, know that I'm there, register that there's not an actual threat that I need to react to, there's nothing that I need to do immediately, slow is fast and fast is slow when it comes to doing this work, and then I feel what's coming up for me.
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Like what's really coming up?
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Because sometimes the littlest thing, somebody saying something the wrong way, especially my wife or one of my kids, you know, can set me off and can make me want to have a reaction, can make me want to raise my voice or run away from the situation and get out of the room and withdraw myself from the situation.
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And when I slow things down, I often start realizing and recognizing that, yes, hey, this is a reaction from another time.
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You know, one of the common things that would happen to me in my relationship is when my wife would correct me or direct me.
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Like so many men see this as disrespect.
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But what was happening on my wife's side is my wife is hypervigilant.
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She's gone through a lifetime of abuse.
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And when I say a lifetime of abuse, she had abuse throughout her lifetime.
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Yeah.
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And it's hard to say it in a lot of ways.
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I acted in a way that was violent towards her so many times in our relationship, not physically, but emotionally and energetically yelling and screaming or withdrawing your energy.
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That's energetic violence.
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My wife, because of what happened in her childhood, because of things that happened to her throughout her life, arrived in our relationship in a state of hypervigilance and wanting to make sure everything would go okay and wanting to make sure things didn't go wrong and wanting to make sure we didn't get off track.
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And so I would be doing something and she would either correct, tell me I was doing it wrong, or direct, tell me what I should do.
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Like simple things like pulling into a parking lot, she would say, hey, you should park there.
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And I would think, and here's what would happen.
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I would get triggered and I would get defensive towards her.
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Like, I know how to drive.
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I don't need you to tell me where to park.
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And when I slowed things down in this specific situation and I really slowed things down and breathed and listened to my body,
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what my body was telling me was, she doesn't trust you.
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And what my reaction was is she doesn't respect you.
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She doesn't trust you.
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She doesn't think you can drive.
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She doesn't think you can park.
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She thinks you're incompetent.
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All of these beliefs would come up that were simply untrue.
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My wife doesn't think any of those things.
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She's just hypervigilant, protecting herself from her own life experience.
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And so when I was able to slow things down, not suppress, not repress my emotions, but actually feel them,
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Often, the emotions that I had coming up, the feelings that I had coming up, the reaction that I had coming up was actually unreasonable.
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Like that feeling of she's disrespecting me, she's doing this, she's doing that.
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That was a feeling from my childhood of being corrected and directed when I was young.
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That was a feeling of being treated like a child.
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My wife wasn't trying to do any of those things.
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She was innocently saying like, hey, park there just because she's trying to get to the next step.
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She's hypervigilant.
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Yeah.
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And often I found out that my reactions were just not reasonable, especially with my wife and man, so many times with my kids.
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There's so many times where my kids would say something innocent or ask a question that would trigger me.
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And I would have a reaction and it would make all kinds of noise in the relationship.
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And all they were doing was trying to figure something out.
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You know, the irony is when I was a kid, the same thing would happen to me.
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See if you can relate.
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I was the type of kid that I would ask a question that was sincere, that I was actually trying to figure out the answer to and adults around me thought I was trying to make things difficult for them or be a smart ass or make it throw them off and I wasn't.
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I was just trying to understand.
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That happened to me so many times as a child and then I was doing the same things to my kids.
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Kids, when they would ask a question
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I would react.
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I would make it noisy.
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I'd make it worse for them.
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And oftentimes, I'm pretty sure they forgot the question they had because there was such a big reaction for me.
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And so when I slowed things down and really started breathing into what my kids would say and pausing and looking them in the eyes so I could see their innocence and the reality of who they are and the fact that they're not trying to throw me off and I shouldn't have this triggered reaction, things got so much easier for me.
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Now, that being said, sometimes I would have a triggered response and then I'd slow things down and I would say, you know what, this is actually kind of reasonable.
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Like I'm having a big, big trigger, but this is not behavior that's okay.
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Like it's not okay what my kid just did.
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It's not okay how my wife's behaving or it's not okay how she responded.
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And that would be a place where I could put a boundary in place.
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Now, early in this work, what you're just trying to do is feel what's coming up for you and understand what's actually happening so you can slow down.
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And instead of reacting, instead of overreacting, you can respond and see reality for what it is.
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Now, here's the easiest place to start with this work.
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And I'll explain why this is easy.
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The easiest place to start is when you're on your own and by yourself.
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When you're not with your partner, when you're not with your kids, the easiest place, like the low hanging fruit here, the place where you can start rewiring your nervous system and show yourself that you're safe and show yourself you don't have to react.
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Use the triggers on your own as an opportunity to train in this masculine martial art of masculine containment.
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And the reason I call it a martial art is we're never going to be perfect at this.
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It's something you train.
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It's something you get better at.
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It's something through repetitions that you actually start to acquire competence at and you get like to the point where it's changing your life because you're more present.
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Now, relationally, that's a hard place to start.
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It's difficult with triggers in relationships.
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The more you can acknowledge them, the more you can be aware of them, the better.
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But the place where you can really change things and start rewiring your nervous system is when you're alone and when you get triggered on your own.
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You know, I used to joke with people that I could be having a great day, get a ton of stuff done in the morning.
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Everything would be going great.
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But if I walked in my office and there was an envelope from the IRS, literally just an envelope from the IRS, had so many issues with taxes throughout my life.
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I would look at it and I'd get heart palpitations and I'd start breathing more shallowly and it would actually cause a reaction in me.
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Or when I'm driving, if somebody cuts me off, that's a dangerous situation when somebody cuts me off.
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But before I understood masculine containment, I'd get cut off and then I'd start behaving in a way that made the whole situation even more dangerous.
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I'm screaming, I'm yelling.
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Sometimes I would even accelerate and do really crazy things in a car that made no sense.
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And so the easiest place to start understanding your triggers is throughout the day on your own.
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Just start paying attention to your body.
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What is it that brings up sensation, brings up excess energy in your body?
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In the case of the IRS letter, it's one of those things like seeing the letter, feeling the trigger, and then feeling what's really going on for you.
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You know, if I was to do that with an IRS letter...
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What I would feel is I'd look at the IRS letter, and I'd remember when I was in my 20s, and I got in trouble with the IRS, and I had a tax lien.
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And I remember how expensive it was and how hard it was to get out of it.
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And I thought I was never gonna be able to pay it off.
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And it felt like this massive payment I was making for absolutely nothing.
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You know, I was writing multi-thousand dollar checks to the IRS every month, and I wasn't getting anything for it.
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And it was taking so much of my money.
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It was making it hard for me to live, to grow my business, to do anything else.
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And I was like,
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And so when I see a letter from the IRS, if I really slow things down, it feels like a threat.
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You know, ironically, it could be a rebate check.
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It could be any type of a notice.
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But when I slow things down, I realize it's not that I'm reacting to the present.
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I'm reacting to my entire history with those three initials, IRS.
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Same thing in the car.
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I'm not reacting to the present.
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When somebody cuts me off, I'm reacting to a feeling of danger.
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I'm reacting to, you know, wanting to get upset with them, wanting to get frustrated with them.
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And what I'm really doing, and this is super challenging, is I'm repeating a pattern from my childhood.
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When I was a little kid, I spent a lot of time with my dad.
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My dad had three ways of acting in the world.
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He was either rage, silence, or punitive teasing.
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And when somebody cut him off, they would get rage.
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And my dad would yell and scream and accelerate and pull up next to people and then go cut them off and get retribution all while I was in the car as a child.
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And now as an adult, I recognize that as traumatic behavior, that I was in the presence of traumatic behavior, that I was being traumatized in those moments.
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But that's what my nervous system grew up with.
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That's what's familiar to me.
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So as an adult, when somebody would cut me off, I would do the exact same thing, even though it was dangerous, even though it doesn't make sense.
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Even though it's really like the worst way to respond, even though it drained my capacity, took me out of the moment, you know, I could have been thinking about something productive and if somebody cut me off, then I would totally lose it and for the next 10 or 15 minutes, I was all reactive, adrenaline dump, my body was activated just because somebody cut me off.
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And so...
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When I was early in this work, when somebody would cut me off or when I'd see an envelope like that, I would feel the feeling and like actually feel what's coming up for me.
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And when somebody would cut me off, I would feel the feelings of rage and anger and like literally wanting to hurt them.
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If I'm honest, that's what was coming up.
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And I think for most people, if you're honest, you're gonna find that there's some unreasonable feelings coming up, some unreasonable things coming up that really don't make sense.
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It's wiring from a different time.
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It's wiring that is actually like not the right, not properly wired in your body.
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It's a survival response that is overreactive and has been miswired, misconditioned, put into your body in the wrong way.
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And so when you do get it cut off and you start feeling those feelings, it's an excellent time to breathe, slow things down, and open space between the trigger and your reaction.
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And these days, when somebody cuts me off, actually these days, when somebody cuts me off, a lot of the time, it barely registers, but that was trained over a long period of time.
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At the beginning, somebody would cut me off, and I'd go to get irritated, and I'd have to breathe and calm down, and I'd still feel the reaction in my body, and I'd still have the adrenaline dump in my low back, and I'd still feel like my body was all activated.
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And then over time, it got to the point where somebody would cut me off and the trigger wasn't as strong and the body reaction wasn't as strong.
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And then over time, it got to the point where somebody cut me off and like I wasn't reacting really at all.
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And I was kind of feeling sorry for them because they're driving in a way that's going to get them in trouble or make them have an accident.
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And now when somebody cuts me off, it's like it registers.
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I just got cut off, but there's no body response anymore because I've trained over and over and over again, slowing down.
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acknowledging the trigger, really understanding this error, slowing down again, and feeling what's coming up for me and letting my feelings come through.
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Not suppressing, not repressing, not stuffing things down, not exploding, not imploding, but actually feeling.
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And when we're on, it's one of the best times to do this.
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Because here's what I want you to know.
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Your life doesn't have to be this way.
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Your life doesn't have to be a series of
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focused and grounded times in between triggers.
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If you start training the trigger, you can get to the point where it doesn't register anymore, where you're not triggered as often, where it's not happening for you as much.
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And by training triggers, especially on your own, by training,
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paying attention to your body and letting the feelings come through, you start training your capacity that when you're in relationship with someone, when it's a comment from your wife or a comment from your kids or from somebody around you, that same training that you do on your own carries over to being in containment with the people around you and being safer for the people around you and safer for yourself.
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Like this is work we do for us, not for them.
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This is work we do for us.
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They benefit.
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Everyone around us benefits.
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And when you train your capacity and you rewire, recondition your nervous system, you end up in a place where you're more grounded and you're more present and you're more in the moment here and now.
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And here's how that carries over into our lives and changes everything.
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As men...
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I'll personalize this.
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As a man, for so much of my life, I was in between these triggered states where I was going up into a survival mechanism or a survival response and then coming back down to somewhat normal and then back up into a survival response.
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And if I had a lot going on, I had so many triggers that I was going up into a survival response and I wasn't coming all the way out of it and staying there.
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And so I was just constantly in a survival response.
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Right.
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And at 53 years old, when I look back at my life with hindsight, it's 2020.
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You can see a lot.
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I know that so much of my life I was making decisions from a place of reaction.
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I was making decisions from a place of, honestly, in a lot of cases, desperation.
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Because I was just doing what I had to do to get to the next decision.
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And now I understand that when I slow things down, as I've increased my capacity, as I'm more present and I'm more in the room, my decision-making has increased.
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I rarely make decisions from a place outside of presence and grounding and being in my body.
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I actually feel the decisions.
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You know how they say, trust your gut?
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Well, so many of us are in this spiral of reaction and reactivity and escalation
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that we don't even feel our gut.
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We don't even feel our body.
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We're all up here cognitively trying to work things out.
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But when you slow things down and you get out of this pattern of trigger, you actually cannot just feel your gut.
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You can actually trust your gut.
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You can trust your body to help you navigate the world.
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You know, I share with people that these days, if Katie walks into my office and she says, hey, Alex, do you want to?
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So often, before she says what the thing is, my body's already a yes or no.
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And so often, that's the answer for me because my body is telling me whether that's the right thing for me or not.
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There is deep wisdom in our bodies.
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I've learned this from the shamans that I've worked with.
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There is deep wisdom in our bodies.
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Our bodies are connected to our destiny.
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Our bodies are connected to what we should be doing in the world.
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Our bodies are connected to our path and to the energetics of who we are.
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And when we start practicing masculine containment and we get into our bodies and we are embodied, we can trust our bodies to be like a GPS system that helps us navigate the world.
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We can actually feel our way through situations instead of just using logic and decision making.
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We can use a combination of both.
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But for me, so often these days, it's the feeling that I get that creates the decision.
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And these days, now that I've practiced containment for years and I'm training this work and I'm working with other men, it is something that I think about all the time.
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So often I go to do something and I actually slow down and think like, hey, is this really what I should be doing right now?
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It's gotten me out of addictive behaviors.
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It's gotten me out of compulsive behaviors.
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It's gotten me out of doing things that aren't that good for me.
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It's gotten me out of procrastination.
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So much of what I do today happens efficiently and effectively.
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in a way that's so much better than it used to be because I'm grounded and I'm present.
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And when you're in your body, that's the best place to make decisions from.
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When you're in your body, that's the best place to create from.
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If you're an entrepreneur, you're in a creative world.
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Regardless of what your business does, you are a creative person if you're an entrepreneur.
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And by getting in your body, you unlock a capacity for creativity and connectedness to what you wanna do that's extraordinary.
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I would not be doing the work that I'm doing today without being in my body and being present and grounded like I am today.
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I wouldn't have found the, it's really an opposite way to say it, the work wouldn't have found me like it did if I wasn't in my body and if I wasn't aware and if I wasn't paying attention.
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And when I say the work wouldn't have found me, I'll explain that in my next podcast.
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I'm actually gonna give
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a Brotherhood update and share the story of how I came to run this organization called The Brotherhood, because so many have asked me about it and have asked me how it is and how it's doing.
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And so I'm going to share that in a podcast.
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But this work really did find me.
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And the way that it found me was by me trusting my gut and sharing what I was learning and sharing what I saw in the world and jumping on a call with some guys that I thought I could help.
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And it created this thing called the brotherhood that cognitively, consciously, like logically, I don't think I ever would have created.
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And it's the most rewarding and the most exciting thing I've ever done.
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And prior to that, I was feeling stuck and I was feeling like every day was kind of a slog and I was kind of running through molasses.
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And yes, I was financially successful and yes, I was doing what other people would think as well, but I wasn't having fun and I wasn't excited about it.
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And today I'm more excited about this than probably anything I've ever done.
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And the excitement just keeps increasing.
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And I got there through trusting my body constantly.
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But the reason I can trust my body is because I stepped into containment.
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I trained the trigger.
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I slowed things down, felt my feelings.
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And now I can actually feel what's going on for me in the world.
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If you relate to anything that I've shared in this podcast and you're interested in stepping into this work and going further than just this first step, I'd be honored to work with you.
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We are in open interviews right now for our fourth container of The Brotherhood.
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You can go to thebrotherhoodsociety.com, register for an interview, jump on a live call with me.
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It'd be an honor to meet you and it'd be a privilege to walk this path with you.
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Thebrotherhoodsociety.com.
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I look forward to meeting you in person.
