Rethinking Masculinity: Strength and Connection w/ Terry and Justin Real
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Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hansen. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. You don't have to look hard these days to find a piece of content that talks about how men are struggling, the male loneliness epidemic, or how there's a crisis of masculinity. And it's true, there are a variety of metrics that show that, particularly relative to women, men are having a hard time.

Men are four times more likely than women to commit suicide. 47% of women in the United States under the age of 35 have a bachelor's degree compared to just 37% of men. And two in three women under the age of 30 are in a relationship compared to just one in three men. And if you're trying to figure out how that gap is possible, it's because women are choosing to date older men.

There's a lot of argument and a lot of different opinions about what the real problems are here, why this is happening, and what the solutions are. But one of the major consequences of this has been a huge backlash over the last decade against gender equality among young men. A good example of this is a statistic I saw recently that looked at attitudes among 8th to 10th grade American boys. These were boys who were just 13 to 16 years old.

In 2018, 72% of these boys agreed completely that men and women should be paid the same money if they do the same work. In 2023, that number had dropped by 15 percentage points to 57%.

Today I'm talking about all of this with two guests, Terry and Justin Riehl. Terry is the founder of Relational Life Therapy and the author of four books, including I Don't Want to Talk About It, Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression, and Us, Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship. He's a well-known couples therapist, and while it's normally me and Rick as the father-son duo on this show, we're turning that around today. And I'm also very happy to be here with Terry's son, Justin, who works in sports and is a startup

founder. So guys, how are you doing?

Thank you. It's great to be here. Very happy to be here. Excited to flip it up on you. Yeah, it's so cool to have you here, Justin. This is such a different setup than we normally have on the show, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've been really looking forward to talking with you guys about this. So to do a little bit more table setting, one of the things that's come out of all of this is that the struggles of young men and the related cultural backlash around them has led to the rise of the manosphere and red pill communities. These are groups of men that believe, to really simplify here, that

that men have become weak and feminized by modern society, that we've lied to men about gender equality, and that in order to be successful, particularly in their interactions with women but also just in general, men need to reclaim their dominance based on a more traditional patriarchal approach to masculinity. And I was so interested in talking with you guys about this because, Terry, you've basically spent your whole career telling men to do the exact opposite of this, right?

So really open-ended, I wanted to start just by asking you, how are you thinking about all of this? What do you think is going on here? Someone once described my work as, over the last 50 years, women had a revolution and now men have to deal with it. And what we're seeing is dealing with equals a backlash. We're not going to deal with it. We're going to deny it.

A couple of things that I want to agree with. Shame is not an effective social activist strategy. And a lot of hetero men have felt shamed, like you're doing it wrong. Being a man is wrong. Male privilege is wrong. And, you know, I grew up with the joke, if a man speaks alone in the woods, is he still wrong?

So, we were told in early feminism that we were wrong and we should be ashamed of ourselves and people naturally rebel against that. That wasn't me and that wasn't any of the feminists that I love. Esther Perel is a man-loving feminist. Carol Gilligan is a man-loving feminist.

Even Jean Baker Miller was a man-loving feminist. So moving into self-righteous indignation and attack is not what I want, and I can understand that people would bridle against that. Having said that, there is such a thing as male privilege, and the system of patriarchy, traditional gender roles for both men and women, does damage to everybody.

And if you read I Don't Want to Talk About It, the whole book is about the trauma that lands on little boys as we, quote-unquote, turn them into men. The way we, quote-unquote, turn boys into men traditionally is through disconnection. We teach them to disconnect from their vulnerabilities, to disconnect from their feelings, to disconnect from others.

and I wrote 30 years ago, The Cost of a Disconnected Boy is a Disconnected Man. And going back to the 50s, first of all, the genie is not going back in the bottle. Sorry, guys. It's not going to happen. You can scream and yell about being dominant all you want, but the rest of the world has moved on. I don't want women to stand down. I want men to open their hearts

and learn how to be more relational, even more vulnerable appropriately, but not at the expense of strength. People mischaracterize my work as Terry's trying to feminize men. No, bullshit. I want whole human beings. I want sexy, soft-hearted, strong, smart, competent people of all genders.

I want big-hearted, strong men. I want sensitive, powerful men, just like I want caring, powerful women. What patriarchy does is draws a line down the center of us humans and says, these qualities on the left we're going to call feminine, these qualities on the right we're going to call masculine. And in the traditional setup,

Women are not allowed access to the, quote, "masculine qualities." And if a boy or man crosses into girl territory, the response is violent, splitting ourselves into half. It was terrible for all of us and terrible for the relationship between us. A couple of therapists I've been working for 30 years

Leading men, women, non-binary folk into true intimacy is synonymous with leading them beyond traditional roles. For a man to open his heart and be vulnerable and compassionate to his partner means moving beyond traditional masculinity, but it doesn't necessarily mean being soft, being weak. That's bullshit. You can be strong and loving at the same time.

One of the big questions here is what's the model that people are carrying around of this? What does it mean to be a masculine person or a feminine person or whatever else? What's in those terms that we're saying? And this is one of the reasons that I was really curious to have you on the show today, Justin, because you grew up with this guy as your father who's probably given you a pretty different model

of what you think of as being a man or being masculine than probably most people are getting from their parents, from their dads. So I would love to just ask you about your experience broadly here if you want to add anything on to anything we've said so far, but also just like, what was that like? What do you feel is in your model? Yeah, it's an interesting experiment to go back and look at what I was given

When I started growing up, I realized I could sit down with a stranger and dive into their deepest, most intimate traumas and issues that they were having and their questions of self. But it took me 15 years to figure out how to have a beer and watch a game with the fellas and just do it normal. And it took a long time for me to realize that both can happen. And growing up, I believed very much in what I thought to be sort of the normal lifestyle

straight white male view of things. Everybody wanted to be Robin Hood. Everyone wanted to be Luke Skywalker. Through my dad, the part that was included in that, that it took me a long time to realize not everybody else got, was this deep level of compassion and understanding of why you're doing, why you help those

that are less fortunate, why it's important to fight back against tyranny or the sheriff of Nottingham or whoever it is that the bad guy was. And not surprisingly, a lot of those happen to have a lot of the attributes that you can find in traditional patriarchal systems. And it's been a really funny way to go through life. But I've also...

despite having the anti-patriarchal father spent my entire life in sports. I'm a traditional frat guy at a D3 school playing my D3 ball and then wanted to be in startups and went to business school and then started a sports tech startup. There's not a whole lot of the compassionate anti-patriarchal folks in those worlds. And yet I managed to navigate.

You took what from the outside could look like a very conventional path here in terms of this, but you had a very different background I'm sure in terms of the things that were being valued or the lessons that were being taught pretty early on. Are there ways that you think that what you got was different than what you saw in your peers? Was there a lot of similarity? Were there core things you would call out? The biggest thing that I noticed that was different was about just

being okay handling whatever it was that was going through you at a particular time. It wasn't the generation that our fathers grew up in. It wasn't, you know, if you cry, you're going to get beat up. But it was like you're going to be in public and people are going to take notice of how you're acting. So act accordingly. It might be something that ends up on social media or somebody's, you know, clowning you publicly about it. And so there was still that fear of

that was in there, just a very different version of it. And for me, I think a lot of the

Things that were different, and I have talked with my friends about this, is just getting to be okay with it. And I was always kind of just okay with whatever the emotion or the thing that was going on was. And it took me a long time to realize not everyone has that. And so I think that was probably the biggest of the many gifts that I was given. One of the biggest ones was just be okay with whatever it is that you're feeling because you're going to feel it. And most people are also going to have similar feelings around you as well.

How do you think that's different, Terry, from the core model that you see walk into your office over and over again in the kinds of dysfunctional couples that you work with or the couples that are on the brink as you talk about? Two things come to mind. One is, while it's changed some, traditional masculinity equals invulnerability.

So the more invulnerable you are, the more manly you are, the more vulnerable you are, the more girly you are, and that is not a good thing. And the problem is that across the board, after 50 years of feminism, heterosexual women are insisting on levels of emotional intimacy from their guys that traditional patriarchy damps out of us, whether we want it or not.

Judy Chu did research. Boys in playgrounds learn to shut up and not express feelings at three, four, five years old. Three, four, five. They're practically nonverbal or pre-verbal. They can't even read and they've read the code. So they still have strong feelings, but they know better than to open up their mouths and express them. So

The traditional masculinity lands on our sons very early and very ferociously. You know, one of my patients, he was a sex offender. He used to masturbate in public on purpose. He was busted and wound up in treatment with me. And we go back to his childhood, his father lined up, stepfather lined up the whole family on the porch.

One day, took his blankie and ceremoniously burnt it, despite his sobbing, begging. He was three years old. This is not something little boys ask for. We get it whether we want it or not. And there's a role disjuncture, the kind of cutoff

that traditional masculinity demands of us is exactly the cutoff that as a grown man, people would wish us to do better than. And then there's this resurgence. Fuck you, I'm cut off, too bad. I'm gonna glory in my lack of sensitivity and you can eat it. No, that's not gonna work.

This isn't going to go away. So again, and I'm so proud of him. I mean, Justin says very glibly, well, one of the reasons me and the guys I hang out with is I'm comfortable with any feeling. Well, guess what? I sometimes have to work with a man for a year or two before I can get that out. That is not, the traditional roles for men and women in our culture is costly.

And I talk about the cost and the benefits of moving beyond those walls. I really want to kind of focus there for a minute because I think that this is such an important part of this is what's actually appealing to other people and what works functionally inside of a person, right? Because the kind of conventional, more patriarchal model, the whole argument of it is this is what people really want.

What women really want to see in a man is a kind of hyper-masculine, very dominant, restrained with their emotions, the whole thing that you're talking about here. This is what women want. This isn't just appropriate for men because it's good for there to be this kind of division between men in this one circle over here and women in the other circle over there, which is also implicit inside of the model, but that's actually what's desirable.

But if we look at the set of traits that we stick into more traditional approaches to patriarchal masculinity,

And then we ask women, and we've run a lot of studies on this, like, are you into those traits or not? Women say, no, we're not actually into those traits. What we're into, both on the study level, and you can observe this yourself, is emotional intelligence and warmth and communication and somebody who's able to feel their experiences inside and manage them effectively. Now, what effective management is going to look like is going to vary a lot, person to person, culture to culture, all of that. But they actually want somebody

who can feel those feelings and be with them in an effective way. And that to me is kind of the big punchline of all of this in a weird sort of way, is that this whole model that's been created around it just is not actually that appealing. So it both has the emotional cost that you're describing, Terry, but also has functional costs for people. This is going to make it harder for you to find somebody who wants to be with you, have sex with you, be in a relationship with you, all of that. And

I think that in part, there's almost like a branding problem here. I'm not sure how to tell that story or do the marketing around that more effectively. And I wonder what you think about this or what either of you guys think about this because I think it's kind of the crux of the issue. It's almost a weird marketing problem. Well, I don't know if I have the answer to how to market it, but I do know that it can be done in a way. And the thing I would point towards, and I've had some sort of experience with it, but the proliferation of the dad bod.

And the idea... This is great. I love this, Justin. I think that there's a lot of discomfort for men in trying to be a father of two with a full-time job that enjoys golf and also be shredded to the gills with a six-pack. Sure, yeah. That's just not something that feels good. For some, it might. I don't mean to say it doesn't work for everyone. But the other side of it, to hear...

whether it's on TikTok or whatever, but you know, those man on the street interviews of how many women and girls too, and this isn't just about, you know, grown women, but you know, college kids too are okay with you not being Hercules and instead just being comfortable and being okay with yourself and being authentic. I do think that there's evidence that there is a way for it to be done and it can be done without it making

people feel terrible or using shame as the only way to do it, or ask them to totally change their entire belief system about everything that they're doing. So whoever did the PR for dad bod, go ask them. They might have a better answer for you. That's an amazing answer. What do you think about this, Terry? I love it. I'm so proud of myself. Listen, here's the thing. In the patriarchal binary,

You can either be open-hearted and connected, that's quote-unquote feminine, or you can be strong, competent, independent, and assertive, that's quote-unquote masculine. You got one or the other. But you can't be both at the same time. Yeah. Because power is power over and not power with. When you step into power, you lose connection. And you see this with all sexes. I talk about individual empowerment, which we therapists...

aid and abet. I was weak, now I'm strong. Go screw yourself. Well, no, actually, we can do... How about in RLT, we teach people loving power. I was weak, now I'm strong. This is what I want from you.

Let me teach you how to do it for me. Let me encourage you. Let me stand up for myself with love for you and help empower you to come through for me. Guess what? It's in my interest to empower you. I want you to come through for me. Let's think like a team, but that moves beyond patriarchy. And so when we think about moving beyond traditional masculinity, everybody goes to softness.

Oh, we don't want dominant men. We want soft, sensitive men. Well, how about the soft and sensitive in this moment and toughest nails in that moment? How about a whole person who can adapt to what's in front of them? And let me tell you something. Nobody's asking men to give up their strength. That is a bullshit caricature of what's being asked.

Be strong, but redefine what strength is. Be strong and loving and big-hearted and connected all at the same time. And every day, RLT therapists teach men how to do all that. Women too, how to be loving and assertive at the same time. And being loving and assertive at the same time moves beyond strength.

patriarchy. It moves beyond this culture. It's pioneer work, but it is the reclamation of wholeness that we're about. I don't want soft men. I don't want hard women. I want whole human beings who can deal with what's in... Look, here's an open secret. A lot of hetero women like dominant men in the bedroom.

I don't want men to divest of strength. I want them to redefine strength so that it's not equated with dominance.

And that is new. And why people keep going back and forth between, well, we're going to be sensitive guys and have no strength at all, or we're going to have a resurgence of, you know, back in the 50s and be big swinging dicks and who gives a shit. No, we can move beyond the binary and reclaim something that's new. That's what I'm about.

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There are a lot of people who do not need to be convinced around this. You don't need to convince me around this. You probably don't need to convince a lot of women around this. The people who need to be convinced, the not-preach-to-the-choir crowd, I'm familiar with. It's a 20-ish-year-old guy, got aspects of this model that were dripped into them over time just through the general culture that we all kind of live in. They probably don't have a relationship. They probably are experiencing a lot of resentment.

And a big piece of this that we haven't talked about yet is just broader economic movement over time. Women are in the workplace more for thousands and thousands of years, essentially. Men could basically trust that due to the fact that they were the primary economic provider, they would end up with a partner almost by accident, almost by default. What you're describing, Terry, is I think a process that often requires a lot of introspection and

A lot of investigation. Sometimes it requires digging up some emotions that the person isn't so comfortable dealing with. That's kind of a tough pitch when on the other side of the spectrum, it's like, just be stronger and more assertive and yell at people a lot. So that's the piece of it that I've kind of struggled with internally in terms of how to talk with people about this. Well, I'm going to punch in Justin because he hangs out with all these people. He did business with these people.

It's been a help to me and some of my faith in humanity of it all and also a disappointment in seeing some of the results of the ways that the last couple of years have gone. But it does feel less to me, especially the younger you go, about a reassertion of something old.

And more of a I don't think that I fit in either side of this spectrum and I don't think that it's my fault either and you know to the earlier point about shame not being

a good tool to be able to change people. The amount of, you know, just the, the screaming you can find either on cable news or you go on any real social media chat interactions, there's bound to be just anger and hatred. And there's more, what I've found is that there's more people that want to just live in that middle space and don't feel the blame of

past generations' mistakes, but also don't totally feel like they're against some of the benefits or some of the things that are part of traditional life. They also want to make sure that they can go and relax and sip a drink with a funny umbrella in it without fear of getting chastised. There's this middle space. And I believe, in my interactions at least, there's more people that are in that. There might be

magnets on either side of the spectrum, drawing people that are more interested in just being led.

on one way or the other. I think that now we have some very powerful voices pulling hard in directions that aren't helping as much as we want them to. And the truth of the matter is that there's to define that middle space where it's okay to be both, where it's okay to be dominant in a way that it's acceptable and desired from your partner to be dominant, but not necessarily dominant in a way that your coworkers

don't want you to be dominant or your kids don't want you to be dominant. There's nuance to it. And defining that middle and making that middle sort of broader is a lot harder thing to do than to promote either side of the spectrum as adamantly as you tend to hear.

I'm wondering, Terry, how you've seen people actually go through aspects of this process as maybe a way into answering this question therapeutically, where somebody's coming in with a view about what it means to be a guy that is simply not getting them the results that they want in their life, and that's why they have landed in your office. What does that actually look like?

Well, first of all, a lot of the men that I work with are what I call wife mandated referrals. Yes. Yeah. They're not in pain. The people around them in pain, they're trouble.

Let me say that again. When you ride more in the one-up position, when you're riding the one-down position, which is more traditionally feminine, you're in pain. When you ride in the one-up position, you're entitled, you're irresponsible, you're insensitive. All the things women complain about. You're not in pain as part of being in the one-up. It feels good. It doesn't feel bad. Shame feels bad. Grandiosity feels good.

And so when men come to see me, they're in trouble by and large. You're a doctor who's yelled at one too many nurses, or most often you're a husband whose wife has got one foot out the door, or you're coming back from an affair. So some sort of crisis has made it clear to you that it ain't working. Unlike a lot of therapists, I bring in the family as part of the treatment.

I learned this by working with men. You do individual therapy with a guy. It's like, how are things? Fine. A little stress. Oh, where? Well, work and wife. How's the stress showing up? Back, I...

You bring in the wife and the kids, it's like dad's sucking down three martinis at night. He's screaming at everybody. We think he's clinically depressed. He needs some goddamn medication. He isn't admitted. You just saved yourself three years of therapy. So it was really through my work with men that I focused more and more on couples because I came to the belief that what ails men is disconnection and the cure is reconnection.

And the best way of helping men learn to be relational and reconnect is by using the laboratory of the relationships they're in. That's how I shifted. But it started with teaching men how to be relational. Almost all the men who see me are not relational. And one of the first distinctions I make for us, and I have to teach many of the men I work with this, is a distinction between what I call gratification and relational joy.

And many of the men that I work with have been living most of their lives based on gratification, success, money, work. They don't know what relational joy is, many of them. And relational joy is a deeper down pleasure that's just about being connected and being there. A boy's question of the world is, what do you got for me? Gratification. A man's question is, what do you need?

what's going on here? How do I show up? And we know from research, giving actually makes you happier than getting. But there are a lot of boys out there in 50, 60-year-old bodies. A man is, how do I show up? How do I take care of my biosphere? How am I a good steward of this?

And it actually is better for you emotionally, physically, certainly relationally to become a family man and not a selfish boy. Gratification, man, you're a sieve. It's like pouring water through a sieve. It's great in the short run, but it will never, ever make you happy and healthy. There's a deeper job to do.

What does this make you think about Justin as you're just kind of hearing Terry talk about this? Bringing it to a little bit of the world that I know and spent my time in in the sports space. There's a lot of conversation around things like the difference between you know a pure mamba mentality driven killer that people want to be and the other side of the spectrum being that you know often cited loser talk.

of people talking about, you know, usually just reality. And I think that when at a certain point something transitioned where either the amount of money just got so big that, you know, if you're a professional athlete, you're a professional athlete, you're in that 0.01% of people. So you're no longer just fighting amongst the crowd to separate yourself. You have

And why you do it and what you do it for starts to take a much bigger presence than just the sheer to win. That that's the, you know, the only reason why. And if the, the guy that I think a lot about that sort of this, a new, newer embodiment of it,

is my personal favorite player at the moment, which is Shohei Otani, who, if you know anything about professional baseball, you know that being either a hitter or a pitcher is an extraordinary effort to do both. It is your entire time, focus, dedication, everything is absolutely sucked into doing that. And he is unequivocally the most amazing baseball player that our generation has ever seen.

depending on how much longer he can do it for, could be the greatest baseball player of all time. And there is not an ounce of killer to be found in his interactions with his teammates, with the rest of the world. It is built off respect. It's built off of competition. There will be a winner. There will be a loser. There's one guy on the mound. There's one guy holding the stick. Someone's going to win this one.

But it's not based off of hatred. It's based off of the love of the thing that you're doing. And I point to him regularly as the definition of what a

A new perfect athlete could be the one that is hyper-focused, only caring about winning, but not to the detriment of others and not purely for the promotion of himself either. It's for the love of doing it. And if you ever get a chance to watch him, if you get a chance to look into him, you can tell that this man loves what he does more than anything else out there. And I think that's

One of those examples of, you know, you talk about what it's like to grow up with someone that's been preaching it for this long. There's a certain aspect of, I want to see others live it beyond just me. And I want to see that there is this next thing and that

his work has been successful and the people are transitioning and I think Shohei amongst many are one of these great examples of the fact that you can there is an evolution to be found there is another area and it's not it's neither soft nor unsuccessful and it's certainly not just to scratch and claw and make sure that your opponent never gets up again it's it's love it's this middle space of

caring and being relational in the moment. CB Yeah. Well, I love this example. And one of the reasons that I love this example is because of the authenticity of it that you're speaking to. And when you think about how we bucket these traits, like bucketing what's in masculinity or bucketing what's in femininity,

People are complicated. They are a complex blend of stuff that doesn't easily sift into all one bucket or all of the other bucket. And so when we indoctrinate people into a worldview that requires you to be all one bucket in order to get what you want, be successful in life, find a loving partner in terms of how that worldview works,

Just as Terry has been talking about, you got to cut off aspects of who you are. So what do you do? Well, okay, you shift into the performance of gender. Judith Butler, a bunch of other people have talked about this, right? We socialize people to act a certain kind of way. And in that act, there's a lot of inauthenticity. You can see it sometimes in people who do that really macho performance. I'm thinking right now of the Tate brothers and things like that as a really extreme example of this. There's so much performance in it. It's so much act, right?

And I think that sometimes it's easy to miss the pain that is kind of inherent in doing that. Like the suffering of when you look at yourself and you look inside and you go, this is not really who I am, but I feel like I need to be this way in order to get ahead or to be successful, whatever it is for a person. And then you can have this moment sometimes where you look inside and you're like, well, actually, here's how I really feel.

And that here's how I really feel becomes more how you're being and how you're doing on the outside. And there can be some pain associated with that, but it can also be this really beautiful experience that a person has of kind of reclaiming aspects of their interior. That you're not forced to be all mamba mentality in order to be a super elite athlete. And I think that's just a great example of it. You know, the essence of traditional masculinity is invulnerability. But I've got tough news. We are vulnerable.

As humans, pretending to be invulnerable is a pretense. We are vulnerable. You've heard me say this. Russ has heard it a thousand times. Trying to outrun your vulnerability is like trying to outrun your rectum as a way of following you. As a way of catching up to you, absolutely. So it's bullshit, this macho. That's not real. Yeah.

We are human. We are not always in control. We're not always in charge. We don't always know what the hell to do. We do get scared. We do get sad. We do get lonely. We're human. And it's trying to live up to what is essentially a lie.

It throws men who are bought into it in a chronic state of anxiety and depression and shame because you can't live up to it. It's not real. It's just bullshit. What are you trying to live up to? And it's an incredible relief to get out of that straitjacket and just be yourself.

So that's one. And then the other is about flexibility and adaptability. Yeah. You know, we psychologists, we like adaptability. We want you to be adaptive to what's in front of you. And when you're not, we call that maladaption, and that's a symptom. So I have a story. I love to tell stories.

Justin was there, not at that particular moment, but we were in Maasai land in Tanzania. I had a men's group for four nights running with the elders of the tribe. And we talked about everything, women, death, God. And we talked about being a man.

And here's the story. It went from English to Swahili to Maasai to Swahili to English, and I asked them, in the United States, there's a debate about what makes a good Marani warrior man. And these guys were, this is the real deal. I said, some people think a good Marani warrior man, same name. A good Marani is strong and tough. Some people think a good Marani is sensitive and sweet.

Which is it? What do you guys think? It's your story. And this one little guy got about four foot two, must've been 300 years old, stands up and he sounds like he's royally pissed off at me. And it translates, I have no interest in talking to you about what makes a good Mirani. Don't bore me. But I will talk to you about what makes a great Mirani. He said, when the moment calls for fierceness,

a good marani will kill you. They will kill you. Don't cross them. When the moment calls for tenderness, a good marani will lay down a sword and shield. They really do carry swords. Lay down a sword and shield and be sweet like a baby. A great marani knows which moment is when. That's my guy. Now, if he can figure that out, we can figure it out. When you are starting to do this kind of work with a person, Terry, you talked about giving up invulnerability.

Sorry, vulnerability chases you. It's just like your rectum. It has a weird way of catching up. But giving that up, even though long-term, I think a lot of benefits for a person. Emotional integrity, authenticity, more flexibility inside of your relationships, more comfort with the natural unpleasant emotions that come along. I think that Freud was wrong about a truly tremendous number of things, but I think he nailed repression. So pushing an emotion down doesn't help you out at all.

And so we've got this kind of chronic bottling that's happening in the culture, and then it pops out in these really unpleasant ways. So a lot of benefits to this work long-term. But in the short term, part of that process can be really uncomfortable for people. I'm sure you've seen people go through it inside of the counseling room. And I'm wondering how you help people get through that part of the process.

How about courage? How about strength? I love that. Okay. Virtues that you guys are like screaming at on the internet. Why don't you, you know, one of the things I say is we don't ask women to deal with wild animals and we don't ask men to deal with wild feelings. It's like open your hearts and have some manly courage and face your feelings.

Why not? And you don't have to do it alone. You can do it with allies and friends, therapists, and yes, even partners standing beside you and holding your hand while you do it. Yes, it's uncomfortable. Yes, it's frightening. Yes, it feels like you're breaking the rules.

Leading men, women, non-binary folks into the intimacy we all desire means reconfiguring traditional gender roles. Men have to open their hearts and women have to be powerful and loving at the same time. We all have to learn how to do this. By and large, we didn't learn it in our families. We certainly didn't learn it in the culture. We are pioneers. Great, do it.

Justin, I'm sort of curious the same question for you, but from your personal experience with this. I know for me growing up, psychologist dad, a lot of psychoeducation from a young age, as you were saying. I knew a lot of the terminology growing up. The grabbing a beer aspect of it probably came to me a little bit later. I got there eventually. But really for me, some of the discomfort was about feeling like I was this

more sensitive more emotional person moving through a world that did not have a lot of interest in that. Yeah, definitely the shared experience for sure I think you know I think a lot about sort of mostly like the late high school through college and early twenties years of being this formative time of watching.

And, you know, having my own experiences and feelings and then watching others go through some pretty intense and sometimes debilitating, sometimes incredibly joyful and amazing changes and new chapters. And one story comes to mind of I was talking to a friend who was a pretty violent background and was really struggling with just the simple act of just crying.

And there was something, the personal thing that he was going through and he just he really needed his parents, most importantly, his father's help in trying to help him out of this jam.

he kept saying he wanted to be strong. I can't cry. I want to be strong. And I remember being able to without knowing exactly where it was from, but sort of helping him reason to the point of if the fear of showing the emotion is to be fearful of not being strong and the awareness of having the emotion

is to know enough to be able to stifle it down. Wouldn't the person that's willing to go past repression to go and be open, be the stronger of the two of them in that moment and to be comfortable enough to let that out, to be strong enough to be vulnerable?

to be able to admit that's where I'm at and that is the position was like the most grown up thing that he could do in a moment where he was trying to avoid coming off like a, you know, a small hurt child. The truth that I've always found with my friends, with people I briefly encounter is that, you know, to your point, emotions are in there. The feelings are in there. The sensitivity is in there. And you know, it's,

The repressed ones probably feel it the most more than anyone. I think it's a Michael Jordan quote. I'm not 100% sure, but they asked him what it's like to not feel pressure in big moments. And he goes, who said I don't feel pressure? Even the most intense moments

most successful, you feel it. You can't not feel it. I think the key that I've been looking for is just trying to get to the point of recognizing whether it's feminine and masculine, whether it's soft or strength, just sit in reality for a second and tell me you're not experiencing something. Tell me you're not feeling the way that you're feeling about it. And that's not what we're here talking about.

And if that's a good place to start, then let's just start there and build off of it as opposed to trying to put away the reality or the feeling that everybody is clearly experiencing in the moment. What's that make you think, Terry? I see you just watching Justin talk. He makes me look good, this kid. If you're wondering what competence, strength, and big heartedness looks like,

The two of you young men are embodying it. That's very touching, Terry. I really appreciate that for starters. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.

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I'm not telling you to go out there and wear your heart on your sleeve and have the other boys beat the crap out of you. Sure. I could have done a better job, to be honest, Justin, I'm sorry about this, equipping him to deal with political reality. Not everybody is as big-hearted and welcoming as we would wish them to be. You have to negotiate that. I love what you said, Justin. Is this comfortable? No.

Is it comfortable to face uncomfortable feelings? No, they're uncomfortable. That's why we don't want to face them. But where's your courage, man? Man up and open your heart. Man up and cry a little, you know? Yeah, be strong enough to cry. So it is all music to my ears. And honestly, I don't mean to whatever, but you guys are the after picture. I mean, you say, are there models of...

strong, big-hearted young men. Well, thank you for this podcast, for us talking to you. Appreciate that, Terry, really. I think that for me, what I'm going to take away from this in terms of how I think about it,

is the focus on flexibility that you've really emphasized throughout your work, Terry. The wholeness aspect, the not either or, you're able to move from one thing to another. The Maasai story I thought was a beautiful encapsulation of this, like a great warrior is the person who knows when to be each. And I think that speaks to what you were saying a second ago about the notion of equipping people.

to understand the way the world is. The world is not always the cozy container we want it to be. Sometimes the world is a really messy place and you got to come forward with an aspect of your personality inside of a given setting.

And that can be a real value that we teach people. And the way you teach people it is I think you see the rewards of it out in the world. That's why I'm so focused on the PR problem of all of it, where for me the big question is, okay, we can talk about what these different models look like and what are good aspects to bring into them. That's great. The real question these days for me is how do you talk people into it? How do you convince them? How do you show them that there's an alternative that's not just like,

objectively true, in quotation marks. Who knows what objective is a tough word, but actually will get them the things they want in their life. Really? Wow. And that's the crux. And so that's why I'm so, how do we show them that this is how you get what you want? Yeah. It's in your interest to do this. And listen, I want to hear what Justin has to say about this. I want to say this though. What's in my back pocket

is that relational connection is what we humans are born for. It's in our design. It's baked in.

And what I say to guys is you learn to be relational and connected, you'll live 10 years longer. How's that for some motivation? Literally, you will be physically healthier. You will have a happier marriage and you'll do less damage to your children. You know what? Here's a simple question for all the therapists and coaches. What kind of father do you have? What kind of father do you want to be?

Why do you want to pass on to the next generation? Will you let me help you do that? And the old, walled-off, unemotional, dominant bullying model of what it means to be a man is going to cost you years of your life, a miserable marriage, and damage to your kids. You still want it, or are you willing to try something new?

You talk straight to men. They're not stupid. And my experience, not the big loud mouth internet, but when I'm talking to a real person in front of me, you lay it out, they get it. Okay, what do I have to do? We just need a collective version of that. That's what comes next.

Yeah, and I think that that's the piece that I wish I saw more of was the "what's in it for me" aspect of it. And I wish that it didn't have to be so cynical, but I'm down for a little cynicism in terms of how we talk about this stuff. What do you think about this, Justin? One thing that I've been just thinking a lot about is even to the Tate brothers of it all, but to anybody that's pushing the uber masculine

that type of approach. Point me towards the happy example that everything's worked out well. Find me the one with the same heritage. What's the aspirational model here? Yeah, no, it's often single dysfunctional men who do not have a good track record inside of their relationships. And these are the people giving the advice, which is wild. The anti-stop being weird campaign I thought was great in a way that was just like, just be normal.

Yeah. Like why why do you have to be so extreme? More likely than not, you look at that the the end point of the talking points about, you know, being the hardest most alpha guy in the world and you don't find things that make sense to anyone other than the same lonely scared boy. That's the first that's the person that's going to pick that up and listen to it. Everyone else

that sees that end for an example, that sees sort of what that life leads to, is not really interested in it. I don't want to have to scream at people on the internet every day. I don't want to have to fend off. You're trying to constantly out alpha anybody. Who are your buddies?

Are you just surrounded by a bunch of dudes? You just constantly get to beat down? Is that really what you want to be around? Or do you want to be around a group of friends where you're all going to clown on each other when the time is to clown on you? And it's okay. You don't want to be the most of your friend group. You just want to be in a friend group.

And I don't know how to market that. I don't know how that takes holds. I know. I think it kind of did there, Justin. I think that was a pretty compelling pitch, personally. I don't know how aspirational just being normal is, but normal has so many bad connotations to it. But I think at a certain point, if we just say normal is a new thing, it's not about conformity. It's about like,

having this grasp of reality where you feel things and things are challenging and hard and you're not Superman, that's normal. Like that's, that's okay. You're, you're not going, I, as much as I try, I'm not going to be Shohei. I'm not going to be Tiger. And somehow I still managed to go and play golf when I do and be happy with it. Like whatever that is, be that and spend some time in it. And I think that you might find it a little easier.

than trying to be the other thing that you'll never get to. Yeah, I think the pretty good at life is definitely an aspirational target. And I hope it's more of one for people for a whole bunch of different reasons. So Terry, as we get to the very end here, is there anything that's just burning a hole in your pocket that you want to say that we haven't touched on so far? Are you feeling pretty good here?

I am feeling so proud of my son. It's like I'm just bursting, but I got to tell a story. I am like the least sports dad, but my poor son is really- And confirmed. He's lucky to have Belinda for a father because I'm just like that. And we used to say, Justin was going to leave us and go to South Boston and find his biological family that we really love.

I remember this moment, we're driving to school, he's little, and he's chatting away, and he's doing something obnoxious, and I tell him to stop, and he just escalates, and I tell him to stop, and he escalates. And I look at him, and I go, do you think that's functional for our relationship? And my, like, what, nine, 10-year-old son falls on the floor laughing hysterically, and he says, Dad,

there are dads driving sons to school all over America right now, talking about the game, talking about whatever. How many of those sons do you think are listening to their father say, do you think that's functional for our relationship? I think it was a sample size of one there, Terry. I think we had exactly you guys on that one. So you are normal despite Belinda and me and, uh,

I really do mean it. You asked for models of big-hearted, strong, yet sensitive, emotional men.

They're out there. They're not grabbing the internet. They're not grabbing bullhorns. We need to start. That's why I'm on this podcast with you right now. Yeah. We need to have a coalition of men who will explicitly offer an alternative to this resurgence of boneheaded violence. I believe in you. So I'm just feeling, believe it or not, hopeful that,

which I don't always feel, and very proud. Really appreciate your time here. It was so great to talk to both of you. I had a ton of fun doing this. And, you know, stay in touch. I really loved talking with both of you guys. Thanks so much for the time. Thanks a lot, Forrest. This was a fun one. Thank you both. It's been great.

I had a really great time talking with Terry and Justin today. I was so glad that both of them could join me. And we focused on masculinity. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a healthy man? And how can we increasingly talk people in to a healthier vision of masculinity? And this is based on a cultural moment where you don't have to try hard to find pieces of content focused on the male loneliness epidemic or talking about

rates of depression among men, depression and suicidality in particular, talking about how men are not achieving at the same levels academically that women are these days, and the general sense that men, and particularly young men and boys, are looking around for models of masculinity that they feel are going to get them where they want to go in life.

And what has really been growing in popularity these days is this more regressive view of masculinity, very traditional, very patriarchal. This is emphasized in the red pill and manosphere communities where, to simplify, they basically believe that men have become excessively feminized and that society has sold men a really raw deal by

by convincing them that gender equality is the way to go, but what we really need to do is return to this dominance model of masculinity. And why I was so interested in talking with Terry and Justin is that Terry has spent his entire career working with men who think that way, who wound up in his office because that did not turn out well for them.

And it was great to see that reflected in the experiences of Justin, his son, who was raised with a very different model of masculinity, a much more inclusive, flexible model, which was one of the things that we really emphasized throughout the conversation, and nonetheless ended up in his own way a pretty manly man. He works in sports. He's a startup founder. He's a very successful guy. And this just emphasizes what we were talking about, that the point here is authenticity, flexibility.

It's being true to yourself. You want to have all the tools. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You can't problem-solve effectively. And when people wear that mask, when they enter into that kind of performance of gender, what they're doing is they're cutting off a huge part of who they are. Traditional approaches to gender socialization, what we think of as masculine, what we think of as feminine.

View masculinity and femininity as these two distinct boxes that each have a set of adjectives associated with them. Men are strong and dominant and assertive and stoic. Women are soft and emotional and nurturing. That's what's in the boxes. Nothing that's in the female box is in the male box. Nothing that's in the male box is in the female box.

These are distinct and separate boxes. And the way that you become a successful man is by demonstrating the qualities that are in the masculine box.

Now, the problem with this is an obvious one, and it's that this is just not how people are. People are complicated. They are unique. And when we try to stick everyone into the same cookie-cutter outline, we end up hurting everyone involved. Nobody benefits from this process outside of the small number of people who are selling courses to that vulnerable population trying to teach them how to be a manlier man.

That patriarchal model hurts men just as much as it hurts women. And that's really what we focus today's conversation on, how that model just doesn't work for guys. And I think that frankly, to do a little general commentary here, this is the big miss that people have made in terms of how they're talking about this stuff.

The most important question is a pretty cynical one. How can we convince guys who were raised inside of this patriarchal model that adopting a more flexible view of masculinity will get them more of what they want? It'll get them that high-earning job. It'll get them into that relationship with the person that they want to be with. It'll put them on a path toward a life that they want to live.

This is not a battle of ideas thing. This is a sales job. This is marketing and PR. And thus far, I think that we can kind of be frank about this, the more progressive version of this, the more kind of flexible, open vision of masculinity has simply not done a very good job at marketing itself. We have not done a good job of showing to young guys that they will get a lot of benefits out of being and thinking and acting this way.

Red Pill content creators, the Manosphere, all of that, they talk about a lot of different things. They talk about social values and cultural values and a return to this kind of positive vision of what was going on in the world 50 or 100 years ago, sure. But the movement largely came out of pickup artist culture. It's not about these really expansive think pieces. It's about helping young men get laid.

And their solution to this, their proposal, is that the way to do it is alpha masculinity. Conventional, patriarchal, hegemonic masculinity. Relationships are transactional, and so what you want to do is build yourself up to a point where women are willing to trade their beauty for your achievement. That's the model. And the really important thing to emphasize here over and over again is that the core argument that's being made

is that that's what's really appealing to women. That is the core argument, right? That women will respond to you better if you do these conventionally masculine things. That's how you get into a relationship. That's what they really care about.

And that's why I think that people like Terry are so important to talk to because he has seen the consequences of this walk into his office a thousand times. And the really important part of this to emphasize is that model, that conventionally masculine model, is mostly devoid of the qualities that women say that they're into inside of a functional relationship. We have a lot of studies on this. You can also, hello, just talk to people about this, which the manosphere types are generally not that interested in talking to women.

It's generally single men who have not been tremendously successful in their relationships who are giving this advice. And what you see if you actually ask people, ask real people in the real world, not the online echo chambers, what they're into, what they say is a blend of the traits that we think of as being more masculine and the traits that we think of as being more feminine. They want somebody, yes, who is assertive and strong and can speak up for themselves.

but also somebody who can feel their feelings and who's in touch with their emotions and who is emotionally intelligent and has empathy and warmth and affection and all of these things that we think of as being in that more feminine bucket. So what does this look like in practice? Relational mindfulness. This is a phrase that Terry uses a lot. This is a set of practices that help people move from a more reactive and defensive way of being to a more collaborative and open-hearted way of being.

Why do guys blow up when they finally touch their feelings? Why do they need to get as aggressive as they get? It's because they haven't actually felt their fucking feelings, okay? They haven't experienced their interior and they have no practice with it. They have no emotional skills whatsoever. And so when they finally get to the point where those feelings come out, they come out in a completely uncontrolled and dysregulated way.

If you have no practice whatsoever driving a car, and the first time you're driving it, it's on the freeway at 90 miles an hour, that story is not going to end well for you. And I loved that story that Terry told. It's not about being dominant or submissive. It's not about being relational or individualistic. It's about having the flexibility and having the wisdom to know when to do each thing.

and frankly, the wisdom to know that you can be both strong and assertive and highly masculine and relational at the same time.

Those shades of gray that we talk about on the podcast constantly, that's psychological flexibility. That's the real endpoint that we're looking for here. That's the target. And guess what? That target gets you so much value in your life. It will help you in your business life. It will help you in your relationships. It will help you live a meaningful, fulfilling life if you're willing to do the work that's going to get you there. So then that becomes the question. Are you willing to do that work?

Are you willing to go through the often painful process of taking a look at these structures that you have inside of yourself and going, whoa, this is not getting me what I want in my life. This is not leading to the results that I value. I guess it's time to try things a little bit differently.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode of the podcast. I had a great time talking to Terry and Justin. Terry's the founder of Relational Life Therapy. He's got a bunch of books, a bunch of courses on his website. Justin was just here out of the goodness of his heart. I appreciate that he took the time to come on.

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