As a child I learned to not need much – or at least pretend I didn’t. Like many kids I had great parents who loved me, kept me safe and provided for. Also like many kids, I experienced a consistent absence of empathetic emotional attunement from the adults around me. So when my sensitive little … Read more
There’s a dangerous idea floating around our world like poisonous spore that masculine leadership means simply: “man leads, woman follows.” This ideal obviously runs deep in many patriarchal religions, but you’ll also run into it in the world of “conscious polarity” where often charismatic teachers insist relationships work best when a ”man is in his … Read more
A lot of men find it challenging to feel fully alive when in a long-term committed intimate relationship. Some men, who perhaps enjoyed being single, who felt lively & dynamic without the responsibilities a relationship brings, may struggle to maintain that vitality while settling into long-term relationship. Being in a two-person system (relationship) requires different … Read more
Earlier this week, my wife showed me three photos of young children, two girls and a little boy each maybe 3 or 4 years old, that she’d made using an app that combined her image with mine. This is what our children might have looked like, children we learned not long ago we are biologically … Read more
The great crises of our time for countless men: a persistent incapacity to fully feel our aliveness, and no elder guidance to show us another way.
“We are so connected the word ‘connected’ doesn’t even make sense.” ~ Rumi ♦◊♦ For over thirty years I’ve been tenaciously throwing myself into the transformational fires of intimate relationship over and over again. For I began a romantic, believing in the popular songs and fairytale movies of my 1980s youth that all promised a … Read more
For this potent drug, a man is his own dealer, and his needle the phone in his pocket.
♦◊♦ I’ve seen it countless times: A man can leave a relationship and return, over and over, where a woman can only leave once. Not only have I seen it as a relationship coach for 8 years, I’ve been that man. In my 30s, throughout the 5 years of an inflamed relationship that profoundly challenged … Read more
I never understood why the women I loved were so often angry at me. Until one day, in the painful midst of another lover-spat going nowhere, I finally got it …
For years I couldn’t feel my feelings, and my intimate relationships suffered awfully as a result.