Daddy issues.Only women have daddy issues … is what I was led to believe by countless other boys and men I know now were themselves just teeming with unexamined daddy issues.(like nipples, men have ‘em, too.)My father has been overwhelmingly absent throughout my life. I used to think, “How could he have messed me up? … 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
As I sit in the serene quietness of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, the memories of these past five days flood my mind. Our annual ELEVATE Men’s Retreat has ended and everyone is returning to their lives, yet the electric energy of countless profound moments linger in the warm summer mountain air. This retreat was … Read more
This week, I’m off to the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina for my annual ELEVATE Men’s Retreat. It is an unspoken epidemic – with unfathomable repercussions – that so many men do not trust other men. For when a man cannot trust other men, it may reflect in the struggle to fully trust … Read more
About a year ago my wife and I lost an unborn baby. Three months later I fully lost my father. In less than a trimester any dreams of fatherhood I still had – of either being one or finally having the one I was born to – were annihilated by Life’s sometimes cruel whimsy.
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.
For this potent drug, a man is his own dealer, and his needle the phone in his pocket.
“The more fragile a man feels internally, the more likely he is to try building an outer shell to hide this fragility.” ~ Guy Corneau (Absent Fathers Lost Sons) ♦◊♦ Throughout my life I have been plagued by the enduring fear that I’m never quite successful enough, whatever my actual successes. Which has been at … 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 …