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
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
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
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.
“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
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.
Not long ago, I just knew my relationship with my fiancé was over.