Dear Men: Break Free from the Negativity Trap

This is a hard essay to write because shaming people for their emotions isn’t exactly aligned with the ethos from which I work — embodiment. However, holding onto immature emotions like a toddler’s worn-out “lovey” blanket isn’t the same as what I teach. All emotions are ok to experience, but they need to pass through you — not become your identity.

Embodiment, at least the way I practice it, means actually feeling your feelings — whatever they are — as a chemical experience in your body.

As we head into this essay, I do want to call men out, but I don’t want to shame you. There’s a big difference. My kids know the difference because I’m their mom, but I don’t think most men had the mom they needed. The one who says, “I love you, now stop all this nonsense, and here — take your baby sister while I finish this.” Unconditional love that also believes in you too much to watch you drown in self-pity or a disconnection from reality.

Harvard brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor said, “When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.”

A lot of what I do in my courses and sessions is first creating awareness of that 90-second window and then helping people gain the capacity to hold just the chemical reaction by focusing on their physical body. No stories allowed. If you’ve had some trauma, you’ll need help learning to do this.

Once you figure this out, it’s kind of a superpower. Emotions, which may have kept you stuck before, become the creative tools with which you can turn your life into art.

What happens, though, when you do the work I do is that you become very familiar with the stories people tell themselves to keep looping through a familiar feeling. The smarter a person is, the more complex this web can become. Which seems counter-intuitive but you know ask Wanda, (if you haven’t read that article, it’s still my favorite).

Women have their own sets of common stories, but I write for men on Medium. The most common “thought story” I hear from men is: things are just so bad right now. I’ve come to believe that many men actually thrive on feeling bad. They just don’t feel like themselves when they aren’t under the safe blanket of life being a big pile of struggle.

I was at the musical Little Shop of Horrors this weekend, living my best theater mom life, and this song came on — Skid Row:

Downtown
Where the folks are broke
You go downtown
Where your life’s a joke
You go downtown
When you buy your token
You go
Home to Skid Row

A lot of the songs in the dark musical revolve around people on Skid Row singing about how hard it is to be poor. A young woman behind me whispered loudly mid-song, “Said every middle-aged man ever.” Everyone sitting around her laughed. No one needed to explain the joke. We all can imagine a man we know positioning himself with women, work or numbing agents in a way that makes him feel like his life is a joke and he has no way out.

We all know it — most men are kind of grumpy.

If you don’t believe me, look around at other guys. No, not when they’re drinking at a bar or away from their families zoning out — day to day. In traffic. Picking up a kid. Getting work done. Stopping into a doctor’s appointment. In their real lives, not in the highlight reels.

Men aren’t happy.

Maybe not all men. Maybe not the men who read my work — but yes, I will venture to say most men spend a lot of time caught up in some kind of mental story where they are the victim of hard things they deem beyond their control. They make little problems into big problems and situate themselves in the middle of stormy relationships with toxic women, instigate workplace wars, and even revel in gossipy school conflicts.

They take a small crush that should have passed right by them into a deeply gridlocked emotional affair — because it feels so good to be “stuck” wanting something they can’t really have. Something they’d probably lose interest in as soon as they could have it.

Only to take up most of the verbal space in every room low-key complaining about very preventable problems. Problems they mostly chose or created take center stage in their lives. Anyone mature, just avoids them.

A lot of men love the idea of being the rebel, the outlier, the sigma male who just can’t catch a break. But for all the tropes about the alpha male, the real alpha males I’ve encountered — not the cold, pretend ones I’ve written about before, not the ones keyboard-warrioring from their sexless basements — are a different breed.

The real alpha males, men who run and serve a community, tend to have big families, employ lots of people, and are beloved by the people they take care of. They aren’t making TikTok’s that disempower women. Their ego isn’t attached to their wife’s beauty or age either. These men are usually pretty embodied. They don’t cheat on their wives, nor do they seek ego fulfillment or cheap imitations of the erotic through low-value behaviors.

I grew up with a lot of these men in my wider community. Having social power as a man — doesn’t always mean you are bad. Usually, it means you are really responsible and that you give a lot of priority to the core players on the team of your life.

So, I sometimes wonder if this ‘sigma male’ identity and the narrative of ‘not fitting in’ and ‘no one like me’ is, in some ways, a cop-out — an excuse to avoid stepping into the massive responsibility that adult men are charged with as fathers, partners, and contributors in the workplace. I see women around me doing this same thing. It’s a collective Peter Pan syndrome.

The sad part is that everything men who lean this way do have seems kind of dull compared to the shiny pull of negativity. They spend entire family vacations just kind of bringing everyone down. When they come to the family dinner table the jokes stop. The party ends. The girl texting them either in real life or from Only Fans is way more exciting than anything their kids have to say.

They might have beautiful, healthy kids and a job paying more than 80% of other men in their country, but those things just don’t bring them joy. Not because their kids, partner and job aren’t great.

Because they focus only on what they don’t have. Have you ever been in a relationship like that? One where you feel completely invisible and you think, What else do you want? You have more good things than anyone I know, yet it’s still not as captivating as the drama with people who don’t want you or the constant victimhood about work.

Back to the quote above about emotions having a 90 second reaction time — this is an intentional act. Yes, subconscious, but also chosen on some level. We don’t choose our immediate emotional response, but we do choose, through inner narratives, what happens next.

Feeling negative isn’t just addictive and familiar; it’s also powerful. If you are the one with the worst problems, then you really need the people in your life to focus on you. You also can’t offer certain things to your relationships because you are in a perpetual state of not being ready.

Just another year, and I’ll be in a better place. Until then, everyone will just have to wait for me.

Many men spend their entire lives in this kind of self-inflicted purgatory.

It’s so powerful to be the victim.

Because things are so bad, they need tons of time alone. Men who take this role are usually hooked to some kind of screen — sports, financials, work, porn, video games — as their main source of comfort. Alcohol, screens, and new drama are the tools they use to double down on the story that they are the victims of their own lives. Locked and loaded.

Is this making you uncomfortable? Did adulthood make you a grumpy asshole or a man version of a mean girl always involving yourself in some kind of sticky gossip?

Dear men, what if you didn’t hop into the comments and tear me apart for this? What if you didn’t react to your first 90-second chemical response that says your stormy ex-wife, your mom, your new girlfriend, the economy, your preventable health problem, and this essay are the reasons you’re mad all the time?

What if you held the reaction of being pissed off by this writing, or triggered by it, or wanting to say, “That’s not me,” when you know damn well you haven’t really tuned into your kids and just enjoyed being with your long-term partner screen free in months? A smile, without alcohol or whatever your agent of numbing is, rarely crosses your face.

Because noticing that you are grumpy — realizing it’s a story you are telling yourself — is your first shot at writing a new narrative. Maybe one where when adversity came you focused on being more thankful for what you already have and more responsible for what you could control.

A new story where you doubled down on what was working, instead of created more things to regret by letting the best thing in your life crumble. Do you know how often men lose relationships with their adult kids and grandkids only to realize later those were the most important relationships in their lives? So often. Yeah, this is also how the right girl gets away and the guy spends his whole life stuck in a story of how he wasn’t ready or it was all her fault because of one way she wasn’t perfect.

Admitting you are the biggest problem and you probably could have kept your family or that you should have left a relationship way earlier before it tore your life apart — is a gut punch. But remember that hit of shame or guilt can come and go in 90 second intervals — you don’t have to die there. So whatever your bag of shame is dump it out. Let it kick your ass and then get help so you can do better.

Memories triggering guilt that lasts a few minutes are healthy reminders of why the new and unfamilar directions we are charting are important. Embodied emotions are information. Your body wants to be your partner in living out your highest good. If you can’t keep up with your habits or find joy in a consistent hobby it’s likely because you don’t have access to emotional fuel.

Finally, if life is hard right now, if there are some scary problems that you really didn’t create and that you really can’t do anything about like one of my friends, a mom, who has late stage cancer she’s been fighting for years like a warrior. If I was your mom I would give you a hug, make you some food and tell you to focus on the good things you already have. Hug your babies. Make up with your complicated parents. Treat every person that comes into your life like they matter. Hold a high standard for yourself. Get rid of your drama. Tune out your critics — especially the one that lives in your head. Keep going. Head down. Chin up.

Just hoe your own row and raise your own babies
Smoke your own smoke and grow your own daisies
Mend your own fences and own your own crazy
Mind your own biscuits and life will be gravy — KM

If you’re looking to dive deeper into embodied living, my coaching and courses provide guided practices to help people build rare, authentic relationships. Start with this one — 42 Embodiment Meditations and audio lessons. I also write a Sunday essay for my private email list, you can join that here.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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