Why A Man Struggles With Excitement

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“Excitement.” Like many men, that’s an emotion I’ve long struggled with.

It would usually take a biiiiiig experience to feel for even brief moments the visceral joy that excitement radiates throughout the body like warm sunlight pouring into a darkened room.

Take for example, in just 24 hours I’m off to Ireland where 16 men are joining me for my first Elevate in Epic Ireland Men’s Retreat. Now, leading up I’ve surely had moments when I actually feel excitement – like when I first dreamed it up sitting in the woods and when I sold it barely out a month later. But otherwise, honestly, the emotion of excitement has largely eluded me until now.

In the early years of our relationship, I advised Silvy to not ask me one of her clearly favorite questions, “Are you excited about … (fill in the blank)?”

She – the consummate feminine-core woman who feverishly delights in the feeling-tones of life – always wants to know how I’m feeling about this or that. Especially in our beginning, my generally stoic face and less feeling-focused language gave her little to go on, so she’d ask: “Are you excited to see your friend this weekend?” “Are you excited for your birthday?” ”Are you excited for our trip?” “Are you excited for dinner?” (she likes to ask that last one over lunch). And her questions were always met with an unenthusiastic shrug at best, and an irritated verbal swatting away at worst.

I didn’t know why; I only knew that I couldn’t.

I simply couldn’t allow myself to feel excitement.

Consciously, I didn’t actually want to feel excitement. I thought it an inconvenient emotion to be shunned. But only because unconsciously (I know now) I was sitting on a lifetime of unexamined disappointment and un-metabolized grief.

To feel excitement meant danger to my nervous system, yet another setup for some crushing heartbreak.

Better to not feel it at all and spare myself the breath-stealing devastation of life inevitably sucker punching me for the millionth time.

Eventually, through years of men’s work and deep therapy with other men who understand the unique burdens of being a man – and by my wife’s insightful reflections, too – I slowly started to see the immensity of sadness I’d been carrying so long in my body:

The slow disappearance of my father that began when I was 4. Witnessing multiple suicides of friends and family. Losing countless cherished friendships over the years to the nomadic restlessness of the modern world. The painful deaths of too many intimate relationships, which every single time left the planet of my being scorched beyond repair… and on and on and on.

Like so many of us, I had experienced one world-wrecking devastation after another, yet I’d never properly grieved a one of them.

Working with other men also helped me see another invisible burden I’d been carrying, a burden felt by most every man in our hyper-individualistic culture: 

the belief that I can’t depend on anyone else for any kind of support, not just on the hunt for bread, meat, and shelter, but in my need for emotional comfort, for mental well-being, and for belonging, too. 

Many a man lives in that story, that he’s all alone, all by himself, on his tiny little island – even if there be other natives he calls family living on his island.

I’ve worked with quite a few men who lived in a perpetual exile, isolated and disconnected even from the people they love most, and who love them.

A man, certainly one who wants to do right by the world, often thinks he’s uniquely responsible not just for his own happiness and protection, but for the happiness and protection of everyone around him, too. Which he inevitably discovers to an impossible task.

A mortal man can only be crushed by the burden of it all. Still, there’s no space to feel … well … anything, really.

How can a man feel anything (much less the joy of excitement) when his heart is daily burdened by the weight of a thousand heartbreaks? No. He can’t. Anyway, he must stay busy, for remember: he can’t count on anyone to help. Thus a man carries his lifetime of sadness, anger, fear, and loneliness like a 1000-lb block of lead inside his chest, and expects his beloveds to not notice (or at least not speak about it). 

It’s no wonder 1 in 4 men die of heart disease. Our hearts are literally overrun with dis-ease.

Look, I’m a fan of therapy. My wife is a therapist. I work with a masterful Jungian depth psychologist who’s one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met.

Still, nothing has helped me unburden from decades of all that subterranean pain like regularly gathering with trustable men for deep-dive inner growth work. 

Truth is, I’m still working through it all, and probably will be the rest of my life. I thank the gods that I am surrounded by amazing men supporting me on the journey.

A man discovers a massive reservoir of authentic power previously hidden inside himself when he gathers consistently with trustable men.

There is an ancient, primal alchemy that occurs for a man when he invites other worthy men to witness him in his struggles, challenge him in ways that call forward his greatness, support him with access to resources, insights, knowledge he may never attain otherwise, and then celebrate him when he is victorious over obstacles whether big or small.

This is what we 17 men are up to next week at my first ever Elevate In Epic Ireland Men’s Retreat.

And you know what? My plane leaves in 24 hours … and I’m soooo freakin’ beyond excited for it!

Let’s go Elevate Men!!

p.s. If you’re a man looking for a brotherhood of trustable men, and you’re up for playing big in life, applications for “ELEVATE 2026: My Year Long Journey For Men Committed to Thriving” … are now open. Learn more and apply here.