How Athletes Break the "Man Box" - Chris Missimo
Transcript
Speaker 1
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Speaker 2
on today's show, all these labels to find me the label of being unfit for society. That's not me. No, it's not, and I think a lot of people do. That's the whole narrative piece, right? You start to believe what people tell you, that people tell you over and over again, you're a certain way. You begin to believe it, but I never did it. How do you help guys deal with their emotions and even understand them? Great. So I think to understand the micro of your question, which is understand the feelings, you have to understand the macro of emotion. I think culturally speaking, your culture is defined by the environment that you're in with people like to be able to spend time by yourself, develop the relationship with himself, right? Because your relationship with others is just a projection of yourself. When you're not gonna, you're not going to spend your life with somebody that you hate.
Speaker 2
A man should be able to cry, particularly with his partner, and if you can't have that openness when you're in pain, but how are you going to have any type of communication about your pain? It's got to start with your ability to break out of your mailbox and say, Hey, I'm sad right now. I feel the tears coming on and your ability to release that in front of your partner mobility issue and even more powerful as a man to be able to release that in front of your male friend. Absolutely, and that's going back to the. If you can do it with a man, you'll do it with the female.
Speaker 1
Let's get started. Hi and welcome to make love not war. This is Tara Harrison, a licensed professional counselor and relationship expert. This is her husband, Jeff Harrison. Have no qualifications whatsoever. Just a normal dude. We're here today with Christmas Cmo, owner of Masimo motivation. Welcome, Chris. It's good to be here. Thank you. Thank you for being here with us. Well, I always want to start with someone's story at the beginning. So from what I understand, you have an amazing story. I would love to hear what inspired you
Speaker 3
to start Messima motivation to, to discuss what inspired me to start missing motivation. I got to go back a little bit further back into my childhood. So when I was five, I was diagnosed with Adhd, bipolar conduct disorder, and oppositional defiant disorder, which now I know is pretty early for those diagnoses. When was that? What was that last one? Oppositional defiant disorder. What does that mean? Uh, basically you push, it's beyond just pushing back with authority figures. It's going out of your way to be disruptive with authority. Um, that could be, you know, graffiti that could be throwing chairs or desks or in my case, taking bats to people, et Cetera, et cetera. So, uh, when I was five I was diagnosed, um, with those, uh, between ages five and 15 I was in therapy, so that was 10 years of therapy. And then between five and 18 I was on medication.
Speaker 3
So I was 13 years of meds. I think the, the peak of my medication use was about 12 pills a day. Oh God. So I think it was a, like five in the morning or something, one in the afternoon at lunch, I'd go to the nurse when I was in junior high and elementary. Uh, and then like five or six or something like that at night. I mean it was a lot. Um, got to the point where you just take a handful of pills and without water and just kind of gulp them down until so used to it. Did you ever ask your parents why am I taking all these? Or did you always know or. I knew, I knew I was, I was always aware of, of my hyper aggression. I was the kind of kid who would be beating down another individual, another student or somebody make, maybe they made a joke to me or something and I just took offense to it and I'd be beating them and they'd be knocked out so they'd be cool, you know, their eyes will be closed, but I would keep punching until somebody would come pull me off.
Speaker 3
I was just, I just couldn't stop. Um, and then also between the ages of five and about 10, 11, I was about 11 different inpatient hospitals, the longest of which. And that's from crisis through longterm stays, iop intensive, inpatient. My longest stay was when I was in third grade. Um, and it was a hospital in Austin, Texas. And I'll never forget, my mom told me I was going to summer camp. I was going to summer camp that no, but I mean, you've got to understand there's no way I'm going to agree to go anywhere else with, you know, the way that was acting. So I go and we show up and it's, it's a rainy day, it's very, you know, movie esque. Um, she, they started taking me to the dorms and then my mom opens the door for me very politely and then slams it behind me.
Speaker 3
And the door has one of those submarine ish windows. It's circular and you can kind of see out of it and I can. I remember, I remember my mom's face. I remember her face and her crying. I just started. Oh my gosh, I was bawling. I fell to the ground balling and I'm like 10 years old. They try to come over to me, get me to my room and I just won't cooperate so they have to sedate me so they have to inject me to get me to calm down because I just thought, oh yeah, no, I was just overly aggressive.
Speaker 1
So devastating note or a 10 year old. How did that affect how you saw yourself?
Speaker 3
Um, I don't honestly remember a lot of my past anything before really third, fourth grade, mostly blacked out. Um, so it's hard for me to answer some questions about my childhood because I just don't remember what I will say is I remember the moment when things really changed for me and I was in my room, my roommate, his name was Eddie and Eddie was a positive schizophrenia. So for those of you who don't know what that means, it means that you have hallucinations, you have excessive dopamine and so you see things. And so Eddie saw dead people and Eddie, you had just got done with one of his bouts of screaming, you know, seeing his hallucinations that came in, sedated him. He fell asleep. And I'm looking out my way
Speaker 1
window. Can I stop you really quick? Sure, go ahead. I want to know what that was like for you living with somebody that had those hallucinations at 10 years old. Was this at 10 years old to you're talking about. Okay, so that sounds terrifying.
Speaker 3
Yeah, I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. I mean, I guess I was supposed to be there if you look at my actions, but I didn't feel like at my core I was supposed to be there and so yeah, Eddie scared me, legitimately scared me. I mean, I'm sure he's a great guy now, but at the time, you know, you don't know anything different. You're just like, I don't know what this guy screaming. You seen dead people on top of you and I don't see anything and I don't know. Maybe this summer I'll with me, you know, I don't know. Scary for Eddie to. I mean, Gosh. Oh, did you imagine? I have no idea what happened to him, but yeah, absolutely. We're being in a place like that almost make you feel like you start to become crazy. Like you start to change in a bad way or I never had that issue.
Speaker 3
I could see that happening and I've heard stories of that happening. Mine was the exact opposite. I'm like, I gotta get Outta here. You know, I'm looking out the window and wrap that up there. There were these three cell towers. I had the little red light flash on and off. Then I remember looking at those and I had my mom, my mom sent me a card every week and she came to see me every week for three hours to come see me. Wonderful. She's an angel at the same time that my brother was actually inpatient to a with a suicide attempt, so she was driving back and forth between hospitals for us. It was extremely stressful on her, but I have these cards are first brought sprawled out on my bed and I'm looking out the window and those cell towers, you know, just kind of lining up.
Speaker 3
I'm crying, I'm crying. I was scared. I'm 10 years old and I'm like, I'm not meant to be here. That something has to change now. Obviously I was still in therapy for another 10 years or five years. I'm sorry. I was still on medication for like another eight years, but I knew that was the moment I knew that things needed to change because my stay there was meant to be indefinite, but it ended up being three months because of good beat, good behavior and really I was supposed to go. I was supposed to be removed from my parents' custody. I went to this hospital because we had a team that fought on my behalf. The state CPS wanted to remove me from my mom's care because I was, I have the paperwork still at home. It actually quote deemed unfit for society and the paperwork.
Speaker 3
I have it at home. And so they wanted to pull me because I was so aggressive and I can't overstate how aggressive I was with people, a tick bats to people. I used to work at a daycare. I used to go in the backyard and just hit the tetherball until my knuckles would bleed. I don't know why, but I just, I needed to have some type of pain or some type of release. Um, so that was actually the lesser of two evils because they wanted to send me, at first they want to take me away from my mom and then put me in a hospital in Wichita falls where they at, they have a graveyard in the back because a lot of people don't get out of there. Oh my gosh. So, wow. And so this could have been your future? It was supposed to be.
Speaker 3
No, they all said I wouldn't hold the job, I wouldn't go to school. These are professionals and you know, they're playing the stats. They were right, you know, I don't blame them for what they said. Um, but no, I wasn't supposed to have any type of relationship or education or anything like that. Um, so that leads me to Ms Dot [inaudible] motivation. So a fitness and exercise really saved my life in sports because I needed an outlet. Now when I was younger I wasn't really allowed to play the more physical sports like football or rugby because my mom was afraid and rightfully so, that I would just hit people to hit people rather than actually playing the sport. Um, and she was right, I would have, but eventually I was allowed to play football and rugby and things of that nature and started, you know, lifting and it was my release and it was my place to let out all that anger because I'm still an angry person in general, but I have that outlet now and you made this internal decision at 10 years old that I am not going to let this label to find me all these labels to find me the label of being unfit for society.
Speaker 3
That's not me. No, it's not. And I think a lot of people do. And that's the, that's the whole narrative piece, right? You start to believe what people tell you and if people tell you over and over again, you're a certain way, you begin to believe it. But I never did and my mom wouldn't let me. I had no 500, four plan. I did, but I didn't. It was installed out of necessity and they would come check on me, Hey Christian. And I would always say no, I didn't want their help. I didn't need their help. I was raised by a single mother. My mom taught me very early. She's like, this world is just, they're not going to be nice to you. It was just kind of is what it is. You don't need people's help if you take, if you take their health now, you'll always be asking for their help later.
Speaker 3
And so I never did. Um, and so I'm assuming motivation, uh, why that, how that relates to my story is I look to first and foremost help athletes with the mental side of things in combination with fiscal side. So I'm a strength and conditioning coach. Um, but I'm also a therapist who specializes in athlete mental health and it's athlete mental health, not just sports psychology. And it's a big difference. Everybody is focused on how does the athlete perform for the one hour or two hours or three hours per week that they're actually engaging in their sport, but they're not paying attention to the other six days. And that's what I'm paying attention to. So I use a model called ramp, which is a combination of different sports psychology concepts with a little bit of twists that I added in there. So it stands for relatedness, autonomy, mastery and purpose.
Speaker 3
And these are the four pillars of success I look at for my athletes. And so when the CMO would have motivation, first and foremost is to give athletes to avenue that they need both physically and mentally. So I have partnerships with different supplement companies, have a partnership with partnerships with pts. I have partnerships with certain gyms, I have partnerships with high school recruiting, I have partnerships with all these people who can give the athlete what they need, but on the side I have myself. And then also another mental skills trainer. She does more of the sports psychology. I do more of the sports, mental health side of things that make sense. Can we break it down ramp and talk about which each one is, what each, what each one of those means? Sure, absolutely. So ours for relatedness. So that's a typical example would be your a 16 year old boy, sophomore recruit.
Speaker 3
Highly, highly recruited, but obviously when you're 16 year old, little emotionally unstable, right? You're still kind of growing into yourself and so you just got broken up with by the layer, the love of your life and she's the only one that you'll, you'll ever learn, but you have a game on Saturday and it's the playoffs and what are you supposed to do now because all you're thinking about is her and not where you're supposed to do. There's that and then there's also the parents. So your relationship with your parents. What are your parents like? A lot of parents are overbearing, so I have to do a lot of parental training. Not just trending with the kid, but I'll pull the parents in and say, hey, here's how you parent and athlete. And it also depends on the level of the athlete. Elite athletes are often treated as special and they're given kind of leeway with with everything that they do by parents and that's not the right way to go about it either.
Speaker 3
But then there's the other group of parents who think their kid is actually better athletically than they are, and so they pulled them away from things that they can be successful and maybe that's part, maybe that's engineering, maybe that's mathematics, whatever it is. And so they ended up never fulfilling their potential because their parents want them to be athletes and they're just not. Um, so that's the relationship piece. And, and you know, we could break that down further, but so how does that work? So how does that work? I mean, I would think that these younger kids, it's their parents that are paying for your services and then you're on one side, you're having to tell them, hey, you need to step back from, from this deal. Maybe he's just not that good. Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a difficult position to be in.
Speaker 3
But my job isn't to pat people on the back of my job is to help people. And so if I feel as though the parent is pulling their children down, then it's my job because they're paying me to tell them the truth. Um, and it's kind of that, that old adage like, I'm a friend, stabbed you in the front, not in the back, right? I'm going to tell you how it is and what it needs to be and if you listen, you'll be successful in great. And if you don't then it just Kinda is what it is and I, I can't do anything for you. And if you get upset about it and you know, that's your decision, you know, I'll just have to find somebody else who will come and listen. You can't help everybody. Um, my job isn't to help everybody in my health. My job is to help the people who want to be helped. So true. That's
Speaker 1
a great boundary for you to have so that you don't internalize the struggles of your clients. Do it still gets to it all the time. I think though it does, but we tell ourselves the week here, but it's difficult. Yeah. Yeah. But, uh,
Speaker 3
and just one more thing, I'll miss your motivation. It's more than just the athletes and you know, so I still do the fitness training, the body building stuff. I do bodybuilding primarily just because I'm not an athlete anymore and you know, I'm a working professional now so I don't. I don't play any organized sports, so I help people with body building and weight loss and stuff like that too, but really it's geared primarily to the athletes. And then the third thing, the third focus of the company is building a motivational community. So I think there are a lot of brands are or people who pushed to create community involvement. That involves everybody. I don't want to involve everybody. I want to involve certain types of people, certain types of people who want to join a community. That becomes kind of like a social web of very motivated, inspired people who can connect with one another and say, hey, here's my idea.
Speaker 3
I do stuff and finance, hey, here's my idea. I just stuffed in therapy. Oh, okay. We're both part of the, what I call them motivation militia. Then Sima motivation militia are both part of the motivation militia and this is how we met. Let's do something with this. Let's connect your finances with my therapy. Understanding bringing people together who either want themselves to be the best version of themselves or they want others to be the best versions of themselves. Those are the types of people that I want in the community and I'm trying really hard. Basically like a little mini linkedin
Speaker 1
essentially is what I'm trying to create because it's very supportive and it's inspiring and it's connecting. And so ella things that a healthy community needs to be. Yeah. Well hopefully. Yeah, she's still young. That's why there's, there's moderation involved as well. Okay. So we covered that.
Speaker 3
The are. Oh yeah. Hey, autonomy. Um, I mean that one's kind of self explanatory. It's, it's one's ability to think for themselves, to plan for themselves, to keep track of their own schedule, to um, have their own opinion. I'll have a lot of, especially adolescent males who will come in and I guess, you know, athletes are used to coaches telling them, you know, this is how you do this drill and when you do it, I'm telling you you're wrong. I just, for the first part of most of my sessions, I tell my clients and like, go ahead, this is your time, and if they want to sit there for 20 minutes, they'll sit there and I typically do at the beginning and you first start seeing them. The first couple of sessions I just tell him, you know what this time is for and if I've had to sit there multiple times and just say nothing and we'll spend 20 minutes doing nothing, but they need to learn to think for themselves and to engage and to say, hey, here's something that I want to cover. Here's something that's been on my mind. Here's something that's been on my heart, here's a problem that I've had and they need to be able to elicit it within themselves without me pulling it from them. You know? That's an autonomy piece. Making sure that when it's time to go to eight, 30 optional practice in the off season, that it's not actually optional, that you don't need somebody telling you you have to be there for you to get up and go do it.
Speaker 1
It's actually 7:30, 7:30
Speaker 3
self care wise if, if you're overworked and you need to rest, the optional part of it is that you can choose self care and rest if you need to as well. And burnout is a big piece of that. Elite athletes and their parents push them, well, I've been doing this for 15 years and now it's ending and I don't know what to do. And it's like, well that's an identity issue. Well, I've been doing this for 15 years. I still want to do it, but my body is not keeping up. Well that's a burnout issue. Um, so yeah, self care is a big piece of the autonomy to makes a lot of sense because if you don't know what you want or what you need, then how can you take care of yourself? And they usually don't know what they want because they're being told what they want over and over again.
Speaker 3
And then mastery. It's just another word. It's the word they use in sports psychology for efficiency basically. Um, so, uh, how well do you know your craft so that when you go in for an hour and train, that you're getting more than the person who goes in for three hours and trains not knowing what they're doing, they're just like a chicken with their head cut off, right? That's mastery. Saying, Hey, I'm going to take this time and be at work both smarter and harder. I hear this all the time. Work Smarter not harder. That is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Why would you not do both? Why would you not say, Hey, I'm going to do what that person does and three hours in one hour, but not only am I going to do it quicker, I'm going to do it with more enthusiasm and more effort than they did in three hours to.
Speaker 3
Why would you not do both? It makes no sense to me. And that's, that's mastery. So if somebody comes to me, that's where the strength and conditioning part of me comes in. Hey, you know, I've been working on my squad. I can't get it up. We can actually talk about that in our sessions. It doesn't have to all be about mental health. We can, you can come in and say, Hey, I'm struggling with my squat forums growing with this or the other, and I can say, okay, well here's what you can do. Right? So we can work on those pieces. And then with the mental health side of things, uh, I, I just, I can't, I don't like this deep breathing thing, Chris. I just don't like it. Okay, well this is your time. This is our time to really explain why that matters and why oxytocin matters and why getting the air to your gut versus just in your lungs is so important.
Speaker 3
Okay. This is our favorite. Everybody loves to cuddle hormone data. For those of you who don't know, and then purpose. Finally to wrap it up. Purpose is, it's basically your why. Okay, so a sports psychology is moving away from this question of what is your passion into more of who are you, what is your value, things like that. Because if I were to ask you, you know, who, what actor you passionate about right now? Well, if you just saw a really good movie recently, the, the main actor in that movie is going to. I want to see all his movies. You know, I just saw Adam Sandler. I want to go see how Adam Sandler movies now passion is emotion based, so it fluctuates too much. So if I ask you at 15 what you're passionate about and ask you at 25, which passionate about Sko, 35, what you're passionate about, it's going to change.
Speaker 3
So that's the wrong question. It's never changed. No, that's great for someone like it's never changed, but for the most part it changes. And that's because passion is often linked to emotion. Even in relationships, which we're going to talk about your passion, you know, the three, the three pillars of relationships, passion, intimacy and commitment. Passion is very emotion based. Intimacy and commitment are so important. Yes they are. And we're definitely going to get. Oh yeah, because fashion, it's like a rollercoaster way. Too much fluctuation. I trust it. So the purpose piece of ramp is helping somebody understand first who they are and whenever I ask somebody who are you, the answer is always so minimal. It's, I'm a football player. Okay, thank you. Great. We knew that, uh, I'm a son or I'm a dad role. It's a role. It's a role. It's not like you are inside.
Speaker 3
There's no depth to it. There's no depth to it. So why are you play football? I played full because this because my dad. Well, why is it your dad? Will I play? Because my dad played football will. Why did, why is the matter that he played football? So we start digging into, you know, what is this a, what is this piece of you that drives you to do this? Why are you doing this? Because if you don't know why you're doing it, those 7:30 optional practices, you're not going to go to those because you're not going to know why you need to do it. Right? There's not going to be a greater meaning. And I use a self determination theory which is broken down into six different kind of sub categories. I'm not going to go into all of them now, but most people use external motivators, so that's like money, fame, cars, women, whatever it is as their reasoning for being an athlete and if you use that, the I could, I could basically sit with someone for an hour and figure out where they fall and self determination theory and say, yeah, you're not going to make right.
Speaker 3
You're gonna fall away. But that was the internal motivators that you carry with you everywhere. But also if somebody says that that's their motivation, what have you came to them and sort of said, okay, fine. Magic one, you got it. Are you going to stop playing? That's a great question. I've never asked it like that, but my assumption would be that they would keep playing so they could get more, but there's, there's no good enough. But there's the problem with it. So if your dream is to make, you know, I want to be a pro athlete and make $10,000,000 a year, well what have we seen in the in? So I studied a lot of athlete culture. That's a big part of sport psychology. It's not just the research in the psychology, it's understanding the culture of sport, right? It's the culture of sport and in the culture of sport, every.
Speaker 3
It seems like every year we have a new Max contract in the NFL. This is the highest paid quarterback in history. You said that last year and the year before and the year before and the year before, and so what they're doing is the market, the market decide your value, and if the market keeps growing your value, it keeps growing, so you're going to ask for more, but then it's never enough because in the next quarter that comes along and if he can't get the Max contract and he's going to go elsewhere, right, and it's this insatiable thirst for more and while I totally understand the desire to kind of gain access to more resources, there's gotta be a point where that's not the reason why you're doing what you're doing because you're not going to go to Ota is you're not going to go to the summer practices. You're not going to go do the extra things that you want to do and we'll take Tom Brady, for example.
Speaker 3
Tom Brady is not the highest paid quarterback. I don't know if he's ever been the highest paid quarterback to be honest, but he's most people considered him to be the greatest quarterback of all time. Dirk Novinski. Dirk Devinsky has taken a pay cut for like the last five years. I mean I think he's lost in totality, probably about $50 million dollars that he could have earned with Max contracts and he did that to help. I mean it didn't work out, but the idea is that the team would go and sign other players because he wanted to win because winning was more important to him. Playing with good people and good environments was more important to him. So he took a pay cut. Right. And then you wonder why he's one of the greatest symbol. Motivation. Winning.
Speaker 1
That's powerful. I mean, it seems simple as you say it, but it's like you said, you have to peel layer upon layer upon layer upon layer because we are all socialized to go for those external motivations because yeah, if you're not getting the resources you need, of course you need to get those. But beyond that it seems like we're always just trying to get something more. And then once you get that thing, there's always something more to get and you're always on the hamster wheel. And so that internal motivation takes you off the hamster wheel and you know why you're doing what you're doing.
Speaker 1
So, you know, Chris, I'm going to bring this back to relationships since it's my favorite. After the first podcasts where I was talking about men validating women's feelings. Um, well I've, a lot of men contacted me and said, okay, yeah, great. I don't understanding her feelings. This is, I don't even know how to understand my own. So when, when guys come to you, like the example you gave earlier about the guy who, the 16 year old boy who breaks up with his first girlfriend and he's devastated, but as a game to play in two days, how do you help guys deal with their emotions and even understand them?
Speaker 3
Okay? So I think to understand the micro of your question, which is understand the feelings, you have to understand the macro of emotion. And I think culturally speaking, your culture is defined by the environments you're in, with the people that you're in. Right? So if I'm, if I surround myself with very motivated people, I'm going to be in a motivator culture. If I'm an athlete that I'm in an athlete culture. So either these are subcultures, culturally speaking, there's this pressure to, and I think everybody knows about this. There's this pressure for men to not reveal their emotions. There's this pressure for men not to acknowledge their emotions. Um, and so for the first, you know, 20 so years of their life, prime years of their life where you're, you're, you're having the most development, you're having the most brain chemistry changes, you're having the most, um, social changes, you're having the most growth of your life, really between zero and 25.
Speaker 3
You're being told not to acknowledge the emotional girl. Um, so most, most of one's ability to acknowledge our emotions as a male stems from their environment. Okay? So when I'm with a guy, if I were, if I had that situation, the 16 year old, we'd be in trouble because that's just not enough time for them to really do what they need to do. Unfortunately, it's a much slower process when you're reconstructing a man's ability to understand himself. And I think a first that stumps from understanding the culture that you're in as a male in this particular country, in this particular state, in these particular cities. Um, because all those play a role in what it means to be a man. What it means to be a man in the northeast is different than what it means to be a man in California. Um, it just, it is what it is.
Speaker 3
So first you have to understand the macro. The second piece is you need to understand the importance of time alone. So we'll go back to the 16 year old. Chances are he's constantly looking for time to be with other people, his friends to get away from his parents to hang out. But he, he probably doesn't spend a lot of time alone. And if he does, it's on the xbox with other people. Again, escape, right? And so, uh, most I'm generalizing, but the majority I think of adolescents and young adults are fall into a category called serial monogamist or a sub category like sub threshold, serial monogamy, which is where you jumped from one relationship to another and you do this because it becomes a part of your identity being in a relationship and you have a place to go and things to do and you have some type of meaning in your life.
Speaker 3
But what you don't do, that, you don't spend time alone with yourself because when you do you think things that you probably don't want to think. And I have a lot of my adolescence telling me when I'm alone. It's like that long drive when you're driving for three hours and you have the radio going and you get into your feelings, that's what it's like to be alone. And people avoid that feeling. Um, you know, when you're driving down to Austin, driving three hours, it's kind of thrusted upon you, but nobody searches for it. You get home and you immediately turn on the TV, you get home and you call your buddy or get on facebook. You, you're always contacting people. So you're not spending any time alone. So if a man wants to understand himself and his emotions, he needs to spend time with himself in his emotions.
Speaker 3
And so getting an adolescent to do that is incredibly difficult. Um, it's easier with adults, but you know, for that 16 year old who has the game in two days, he's, he's kind of in trouble, to be honest with you. There's not much we're going to be able to do. It's gonna be a lot of crisis management stuff, but long term there's a lot that we can do. He needs to spend time by himself. He needs this. He needs to not avoid relationships entirely because there's a. there's a, a big benefit to going through relationships at a young age to get to know what you want, what you don't, what you like, what you don't like, stuff like that. But he also can't be searching for relationships. Okay. He needs to be able to spend time by himself, develop the relationship with himself. Right? Because your relationship with others is just a projection of yourself.
Speaker 3
I mean, you're not gonna. You're not gonna spend your life with somebody that you hate. I mean you may just, you shouldn't, but you're going to seek out people that are likeminded. That's why athletes hang with athletes, artists, artists. Nerds sang with nerds. I mean we just, we find our people and we feel comfortable with them because they're us. So how can you know who you need to spend time with if you don't know who you are? The SS, um, so they need to spend, they need to spend time alone, they don't understand their feelings and then they need to address it, particularly with other males. So they go to a therapist who's a female is going to be a lot easier to talk about your. I was, I was that way all my life. I hated male therapist and y'all, they all know now that wasn't there before 10 years.
Speaker 3
I pushed back on the males, the females. There was a lot easier for me to talk to the female about my emotion, but what we really need is to be able to talk to other males, to open up a dialogue that men have feelings in their feelings. They're just as intense as women. So I'm glad you brought that up. One of the things I'm very passionate about is talking on behalf of men and how we feel about love. And so one of the things that research actually validates is that men fall in love in some studies faster than women do. The problem again is the macro. It's the culture. And so do you think they fall in love? Just how much of it do you think is love versus lust? You know, like, I see a beautiful girl. I love her as a great question.
Speaker 3
Uh, if you look at it neurologically, it's basically the same. So if you look at it on Mri machine, the part of the brand that's going to light up, it's going to be the exact same. And so that's, that's where the confusion is. Yeah. Uh, you know, if I were to hook somebody up to certain types of, uh, machines, it would just say, you know, flat line, this is what they're experiencing. So we can't say if it's lover, lest I can't save it's lever less. I remember one time somebody was saying something, we were at a race and they saw this girl from the distance and he goes, he said, a man, I tell Ya, I really love her. And you know what? I love the most about her. I don't know anything about it right now.
Speaker 3
I'm smiling right now. And people who were listening can't see this, but it's so true. No, that's, there's this, uh, uh, unknown that men love. It's the chase, chase, chase, chase hunter, bring men. Yeah. Men, men, they enjoy being wanted. They enjoy flexibility, I guess relationally. Um, it's not that, that they don't enjoy commitment either. It's just particularly when they're younger. Um, there's this idea that it's more. I personally think, and if you look at the research, I think it would support it. There's a, there's a push for this fear of the construct of marriage, not a lack of love or capability of marriage. And again, I think that goes back to a cultural thing. I think a lot of it's cultural because, and again, if you look at research for personality between men and women, the stake agreeableness for example, so the big five inventory, openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and narcissism or the are the five main personality traits in their sub threshold and flip sides to each of those.
Speaker 3
We're not going to get into it, but agreeableness, agreeableness is essentially one's ability to get along with others or to go along for the ride. Where do you want to eat? I don't care. That kind of thing. That's agreeableness. Now women, they score higher in agreeableness, but it's not statistically significant, meaning that you're not going to get two standard deviations away from men. And for those of you who aren't really familiar with stats, it just means it's not a lot. Uh, there's not a lot of difference, uh, between men and women across the five personality traits. So where does the difference come from? If it's not, you know, in the nature part, it's coming from the Natural Barton. It's coming from our own inability to express. Yeah.
Speaker 1
And I think that one thing that's interesting with this construct of marriage that is so interesting because you talked about flexibility and men seeking that flexibility in relationships, is that often women who are looking for that kind of commitment can't give fully of themselves and give that flexibility and give that the wild beast in bed flexibility stuff until they have that commitment, you know, so then when you're in the midst of that and you're kind of trying to work that out together, you really come up against a wall sometimes. And I've seen that with couples.
Speaker 3
Absolutely. And I don't think that, again, I'm generalizing because you can't take 7 billion people and say they're all one way. We all kind of had to generalize sometimes. Absolutely. But yeah, so there that I do agree that that women, that commitment piece leads to more flexibility for the man.
Speaker 4
Let's take a moment to stop and take a quick break. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1
Do you look at your wedding pictures and wonder, how did things go so wrong? Have you given up on your relationship? Are you going to let what you've built together crumble to dust? If not, let me work with you to get your connection back on track. I'm opening my private practice up to a limited number of listeners that are serious about fighting for their relationships. Don't let your relationship, your family, your life fall apart because you let your pride hold you back from asking for help. Call me at six, eight, two, six, five, one, five, seven, five, two, or email me@makelovenotwaratGmail.com. Today, we can turn this around together.
Speaker 3
Let's, let's talk about actually one of the things that you want to talk. I want to talk about this man box idea and then we kind of discussed this a little bit earlier. How does a man break out of the man box? Can you describe the man box? I guess the mailbox would be expectation of a man. Yeah. The expectations of a man. So how should he portray himself? How she dress, how should you act? How should you be in relationships? How should he be in business and his career? Um, what does it mean to be a man in American culture? In 2018 will be your man box. Beautiful description. Good. I'm glad. I'm glad you like it. Very concise. Since we're talking about partnerships right now, relationships right now. One thing that a man can do to break out of his mailbox is find a really good partner.
Speaker 3
I know that sounds simple, but research shows that to androgynous people, people who share both masculine and feminine traits to Androgynous people tend to have the most success in the relationships to intelligent people who are androgynous. It increases the likelihood of their success and relationships. Okay. So when you have the more traditional man, I'm mad I'm boss, I'm, I'm dominant type of thing. It's not that it can't work. Um, it's, and it can work for another person who fits well with the opposite of that, but overall to androgynous people are going to be more successful. So if I'm a man I want to break out of my mailbox, I need to find a girl who also presents with a masculine traits who can acknowledge and understand what it means to be more masculine. And you can also bring me down into a more feminine area so I can be more androgynous if I'm not already.
Speaker 4
Yeah.
Speaker 1
And that really lets allows both people to explore all those parts of themselves in a safe, emotionally connected way.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Because now you have somebody who, who gets
Speaker 1
hopefully gets both sides and accepts them that it's okay to break the and the structures that gender stereotypes together. Um, I as a woman can be more masculine and jeff as a man can be more feminine with me and we can do that with each other and sometimes maybe if we go out into the world and we have to deal with all of that crap, we have to put those, we have to put ourselves back in the box for various reasons, but we know that when we're together, we're in our couple bubble and we can be whoever we need to be. We can be all those parts of ourselves.
Speaker 3
So yeah, that's if you want a healthy relationship. Yeah, you definitely know it's definitely going to need to be. Yeah, you're going to need to be, um, why? Uh, I think it's absurd. And to this day it's 2018 and men still can't cry just like the care said, boys don't cry. It's, it's incredible. I don't understand why we can't cry now. Now again, if they win the super bowl, they usually cry.
Speaker 1
It depends only if you just won something and done something super masculine. Can you cry? Or if you're an eagles fan, you've probably cried this.
Speaker 3
Um, so again, going back to research and the crying thing, I'm a big research guy, so the Amygdala, which is the emotion regulation center of the brain, uh, females tend to have more active amygdalas, meaning that they can experience higher levels or lower levels of emotion. More commonly, I guess the best way to put it, the men can, but when a man feels sad, there's absolutely no reason why he can't or shouldn't cry. It's very cathartic. It's very healthy. It shows vulnerability. And when you and I both love Bernay Brown and vulnerabilities, incredibly important, I'm a man should be able to cry, particularly with his partner. And if you can't have that openness when you're in pain, then how are you going to have any type of communication about your pain? It's got to start with your ability to break out of your mailbox and say, Hey, I'm sad right now. I feel the tears coming on and your ability to release that in front your partner as a vulnerability issue
Speaker 1
and even more powerful as a man to be able to release that in front of your male friend.
Speaker 3
Absolutely. And that's going back to the, if you can do it with a man, you'll be able to do it with the female. Right. I tell I at, I don't know if any of my mail burrows are going to be listening, but I tell them often, semi often I would say that I love them and I care about them and I'm proud about them. Just a couple of days ago, I sent a couple of my buddies at texts. I'm just saying, hey man, I'm so proud of you for working hard. I got it. I got a buddy in med school right now and uh, you know, his wife has been helping him financially and, and he's, he feels a lot of pressure to be the best person that he can be all the time. Um, and for his family to who, who's coming from, kind of a rough spot, I'm not going to get to it because it's his business.
Speaker 3
But I just asked him the other day, I'm like, hey man, I'm so proud of you out of the blue. I haven't talked to him a couple of weeks. I was like, Hey, I'm so proud of you, you know, keep going, I'm here if you need anything, um, you know, him and I catch up every couple of weeks, but just being able to reach out and tell somebody that for no other reason, he even asked me how I think you said where, where did this come from? Or just I felt it. That was literally my response. I said I just felt it. So I said, okay,
Speaker 1
well, and I think you bring up a good point there with that example is another way to break out of the box. Um, and to be cognizant of that is for men to be able to receive care from others and not just from women because that sort of feels okay because Oh, women love to care and so I'm going to receive that boob to able to receive it from another man.
Speaker 3
Yeah. Being able to get out of this, you know, when I was younger it was before you would say anything loving to another male. You would have to preface it by saying, no homo. That was the thing that you would say. And, and now I think about it, I'm like, that's super offensive, but at the time that's how you would preface everything you were saying. Another male. Hey Man. Oh no homo, but awesome. Awesome. Catch out there or something. You know what I mean? Just like you had a preface it with that because there was bugging you. But I'm hitting you right? Like you'll. Yeah, after you hug after a big play, you have to, you have to finish it with no homo and it's just, it's awful. Now it's it. It's very offensive now. But the fact that even filled in the need to do that.
Speaker 3
Yeah, says a lot about what culture is telling our young men. I think it's hard for a lot of guys to just tell him another guy that he did a good job because we're so ingrained to give each other a hard time to make out. I'm in groups. I mean like you get a group of guys together and, and if they decide to gang up on you, you're not going to win the argument. You might as well just say, okay. You Alright? Yep. Yep. You when you guys got it, you're, yeah. Men show each other. Yeah. Especially when they're younger. They show each other affection by being mean to each other and call each other names, but they don't understand is that the person they're making fun of a laugh in the moment, but they'll go home and really internalize what you just said. And before I forget, I get a lot of pushback from, from older parents who say, you know, uh, maybe our boys are too soft today, or um, uh, why are you teaching my son to be more emotional or something needs to be more stoic or something like that to you.
Speaker 3
I will say a read research, go to google scholar and read something. Um, uh, I would also say to them that emotion is not weakness. That in fact, if you look at great leaders, great leaders were also very receptive to the emotion of their colleagues and their disciples and all these other characteristics. Even if you're on the religious side of things, you can go to Jesus. Would you not say that he was emotionally intact with his disciples? I would say that he is, I would say that he was, um, so if you look at any great leader, George Washington or any, any great, um, governmental official, they're in tune a, they have a very good empathetic center, um, and they were able to read the room. They're able to read themselves. Uh, and so if you want your son to grow up into a great businessman, he better be able to read the room and be in touch, not just with the other emotions of people but his own.
Speaker 3
And if he can't be in touch with his own emotions, how is he going to read the emotions of that? That's not weakness. And in fact, you can teach him. Being in touch with your emotions also means being in touch with your stoic emotions and your ability to say, hey, there's a fire and I need to put it out and I'm not going to freak. That's part of emotion. Like the emotions that you, that you're telling me he needs to feel. I agree with you, but he needs to feel the full spectrum of emotion. So that way he can be in touch with the full spectrum. Yeah. So when an emotion like fear comes up in a fire, then he can process that emotion so he can act. Going back to your example and also in a relationship that emotion can come up again, fear, well, how do I.
Speaker 3
A lot of people process fear and then a lot of men are taught to turn fear into anger and then that that becomes something aggressive in a relationship when if you understood your own fear, you could process that, have an exact understand exactly what it is, and then you can learn how to connect with it. I'm so glad you brought that up. So I specialize in an athlete, anger and relationships, and particularly with men, we use anger as our pain. So when I see an adolescent who was very angry, myself included when I was growing up, I don't look at them and say, this is a very angry person. I say, this is very hurt person. So where is the hurt coming from? You're not able to express yourself, and so you say, what's the most emotionally recognized and available way of expressing my frustration or my sadness or my pain or my rejection, and for a male, the answer would be anger because it's okay for a male to be angry.
Speaker 3
We're just, we're dominant and we have testosterone and that's just how we act. Right? And very stoic and, and I'm angry so I'm going to punch something or hit somebody in football, that's what we do. But really it's coming from a place of pain and you get rewarded for it and then you get rewarded for it. It's like, okay, this is right. Then, oh my gosh, yes, absolutely. Then you get a pat on the back from people and so you, it gets reinforced positive reinforcement. You have classical conditioning and operant conditioning and now people are patting you on the back, which reinforces the behavior stream are likely to do it. Uh, and it's just, it becomes this cycle. And so the longer it takes to get a hold, that's why I worked primarily with adolescents and young adults because the longer it takes to get to break that cycle, the more solidified the cycle is a and it just, it becomes very difficult to convince.
Speaker 3
And that's why with the parents, it's very difficult to convince an older parent, Hey, your kid needs to not have the same cycle that you have. And I won't say that's all my parents, but, uh, that's really what I'm getting at is I'm thinking to myself, um, you know, your cycle is so immeshed with who you are now, that is really difficult for you to see it any other way. Um, and again, I'm really, I'm not pushing for men to be soft. Um, I do a lot of assertiveness training with women to making them more assertive. So I'm not trying to make men less assertive or less dominant. I'm trying to make them more reasonable and more receptive both to themselves and to their partners and to their colleagues. It's not removing one thing, it's simply adding others, talking about partners. And, you know, this is where I want to go.
Speaker 3
I know we don't have too much longer to talk, so we're going to have to. I haven't had to find out about your relationships. I would like to know earlier in the beginning of our podcast, you said that, that you were not expected to be able to have healthy, intimate relationships, but here you are. And, uh, a year and a half long relationship. Yes. Yes. So tell me, how did, how have you been able to work through all of this man box set to be able to connect with someone coming from a very angry child? He wasn't able to process his own hurt. That's a great question. I'm going to break it down into a couple pieces. I think first I'm going to say my mom, my mom is an angel, so I grew up with a single mom, tells a how right after I got out of the hospital and my Stepdad came into the picture and I see him as my dad, but he came into the picture about fourth grade or so.
Speaker 3
Um, but even even after that, mom really runs the show and she's had to be both mom and dad and so I've had to live with that androgynous piece for the vast majority of my life, seeing both a very compassionate and loving to the point where like overloading to the point where she just gives too much of herself and both when something needed to get done, like with, with cps and they were trying to take me away like she got it done. You know what I mean? She was able to be a warrior mother. She's an angel. That woman, she was able to voice your angel. I call her. I used to call her, I still call her wonder woman because she's able to really do both. But as you know, wonder woman is also very feminine. She's very beautiful or so. She has both dominant and a strength.
Speaker 3
It's beautiful, isn't it? Right. Absolutely. And so first I'd say my mother, the second piece I would say is that alone piece I mentioned earlier. So I intentionally spent a lot of time alone between probably about my senior year in high school. The end of like the very end of high school to, um, throughout college and Graduate School, I've only had three girlfriends. Um, and there were three years between each girlfriend. Not that just kind of worked out that way coincidentally. Um, but I was not seeking, I intentionally steered away from relationships so that I could spend time with myself. I am not kidding you. When I was an Undergrad and in Grad school I knew I wanted to be alone because I knew that I needed that. And you're worthy of learning to love yourself and validate yourself without needing to get that externally.
Speaker 3
And that's what you were showing yourself by this commitment you made to yourself. Absolutely. So I intention everything. I did it eight alone. I worked out a loan for the most part. I mean obviously you have a couple of workout buddies here and there, but I work out a loan because that's two hours a day, five to six days a week where you're just in your head and you need that time to be alone. And so I did that during what I considered to be the second most important four year stretch of somebodies life. I think zero to four is obviously the most because there's just a ridiculous amount of, um, genetic neurological, biological growth that takes place during that time. But I think the second most important four year stretch of somebody's life is 18 to 22 as it really. It really, if you look at research, I kind of sorry to go back to ratios, but if you look at research and it says, you know, the habits that you build by 25 will dictate.
Speaker 3
You mean you can look at somebody at where they're at in 25 and say you're either going to be successful, you're not in what you want to do. Um, you can, you can pretty much guess how they're going to be. Like in relationships, you can pretty much guess how they're going to be like in their careers. You can, you can make a lot of assumptions and obviously they're not 100 percent, but you'll know. So 18 to 22 really steers the direction for 22 to 25 because most people are in school and so I knew, I said I don't eat a relationship right now. Girls are time. Guys are time to. I'm just saying relationships are time, relationships or money. I don't have money, relationships or effort. It's emotional baggage. I need to be able to open a textbook and read it without thinking like my 16 year old example.
Speaker 3
Oh my God, I just got broken up with. But I have a test today. I knew I could not afford that and I had a three, nine, five in my major at Baylor at a four point. Oh, in my minor at Baylor at a four point. Oh, in my Grad program. I graduated a year early from both. I was a national water sip in my masters program. I got the clinical mental health counseling award in my program. I had multiple awards and a lot of that has nothing to do with my ability. It just added more significantly more to do with my choices and I believe habits make the man. And so if you. If you want to be more in touch with yourself and know what you want to do with your life and know who you are, you need to spend time alone and that time alone.
Speaker 3
Did anybody tell you this? Did you hear it from somewhere? I figured it out on accident because the hospital stays. I had a lot of time alone and I realized that that's when things really clicked for me. Like I told you my example with Eddie when I'm sitting in the room just looking out the window. It clicked with me, you know, there are multiple times I went to a couple of hospitals in fort worth where things will click and it was always when I was alone, it was never one somebody gave me. It was. It was never in the moment when somebody gave me advice, their advice would ring in my head when I'm alone, but it was not while they were telling it to me, it was as if it needed to seep in to my mind first into my subconscious first and then when I'm alone, it just clicks. Like when you're taking a shower or driving. When you have some of your best ideas. Oh yeah. That's when all of the things that people tell you finally connect in. They clear.
Speaker 1
Yes. Um, my, my time has come up for that on the elliptical machine. That's why I'm like six days a week I'm on that lift machine because that is my time alone being having a four year old daughter. That's, that is the time alone that I get and um, make it happen because it is really important to make it happen. I will. It's so interesting you talk about this with the time year
Speaker 5
because I listened recently to an interview with a monk and somebody finally asked him a question that he had never been asked before. He said, why do you need to go to a place? And there's no distractions there. There's no internet, there's no anything for such a long period of time. And you said this was the first time anyone asked him this and he said, because it takes that much energy and concentration to have awareness of yourself. And that's
Speaker 3
he's, he's right. And so I'm going to go into edit neurological perspective. He, he's absolutely correct, so our brains work in what's called absolute power. If, if anyone's ever told you, you only use 10 percent of your brain, that person doesn't know what they're talking about, okay? Because you're using 100 percent, you'd be dead if you were only using 10 percent of your brain. Okay? You're using 100 percent of your brand at a time. What they mean is you're only using 10 percent of your potential, but the 100 percent is what's called absolute power, so your brain designates this power based on the tasks at hand, so it may send a little bit more to your occipital lobe. If you need eyes, you're connected to your temporal lobe. It may sound a little more energy there if you need to concentrate on what you're seeing it mason a little bit more to your temporal lobe, where your hearing is, if you need to pay a little bit more attention to what you're hearing, but when you're alone, and this is a sports psychology technique, I call it black hole, has a bunch of different names.
Speaker 3
When you remove stimuli, so like putting someone in a black room in a bathtub like floating, you can't touch anything so you're not sitting either so that you've removed that, that stimulates you and soundproof and it's pitch black. What your brain does is it takes that 100 percent absolute power. It has to redistribute it and so often where the redistribution goes into your hippocampus, where your memories are, and so you'll start to unlock a lot of things that maybe about your childhood that you forgot like myself. You can't remember. Boom. Memory triggers you start. You start figuring things out about yourself because you're removing that absolute power and your brain is able to put it where it needs to go, and if you look at the hierarchy of needs, your brain's always going to put it into the most basic needs first. Go find food, rest, sleep, like be sexually active, things like that. It's going to tell you to do those things first, but you remove all those stimuli and then you're high. You can go up the hierarchy of needs and get into some of the deeper stuff.
Speaker 1
Yeah, which is why it's so absolutely essential for people to have downtime with nothing. Turn off your phones, turn off the TV, don't know my on anything because you need that time to be able to connect with who you really are. Otherwise you don't know.
Speaker 3
No, you don't and people just don't do it because our culture is to microwave society. You're going from one thing to the next year, going from one meal to the next, from one meeting to the next from one person to the next one relationship to the next serial monogamy and then you have attachment issues and then you wonder why you're not able and then you wonder why it's so difficult to be alone because you've never been alone. It gets harder and harder with every relationship you tally up and it gets harder everyday with phones and apps and all this stuff. I mean how many times, I mean somebody just stands waiting for whatever, an uber to show up and they just have to look at their phone and I do it too, to be honest with you, but that's why I have. For me, that's why I pushed fitness and that's why I do bodybuilding and that's why I'm a strength coach because fitness I think is a double edge sword.
Speaker 3
Not only are you getting the physical benefits on only getting the endorphins and the oxytocin and the neurological benefits, but you're getting the psychological benefits because it's. If you're not working out with other people, even if you are working out with other people, you're focused on that one task at hand and that's where you get runner's high and that's where you get lifters hot and that's where you get the pump and that's where you get things like that because you're removing a lot of stimuli and you're focused on. It forces you to be focused on the present and it's a very into your body. Yeah. Especially when you're body building and obviously I. I'm not saying everyone needs to bodybuilding, but bodybuilding in particular is very good for psychology and mental health because if you're doing body building the right way, you know how to isolate certain parts of your body.
Speaker 3
So if I want to work the log head of my bicep, which is the peak, that's the one that everybody, you know, Popeye's got the big peak on his bicep. That's the long head. If I want to isolate the long head of my Bicep, I need to know that I need to rotate my shoulders back, get my elbows behind my body and do certain types of drag curls, things that that move the weight from the short head, which is the elongated head of the bicep onto the the long head and I need to be able to keep my body in that position for 35 seconds at a time per set and if I'm hitting it for an hour, it's multiple sets for an hour. So I have to be very cognizant of my positioning and my body and I have to be very cognizant of the movement of the weight.
Speaker 3
And so it forces you to be present. It's a very healthy version of a unhealthy habits of cutting or self harm because depression is past based. Anxiety is future based. So when we cut, we try to remove ourselves from the past or the future and put ourselves in the present and the painful forces us to be focused on that. But you could get pain, very healthy pain, the ripping of the Bicep by bodybuilding. You can get the exact same thing, but now you can take your clothes off in the summer, look great yoga position whereby honing and Yogis, Yogis for this? Yeah, it's. It's a muscle memory type of thing. Well, Chris, thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate your time and enjoyed hearing everything that you had to say. Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. That was a good time. I'd love to have you again. I'm sure we'll have questions so we will. I hope they do. I hope they do have questions. I'd
Speaker 6
love to be on again. I really appreciate it guys. Thanks.
Speaker 1
As always, I welcome your questions, comments, and love for you to be on the show. If you're interested, please email me@makelovenotwaratGmail.com. You can also contact me via twitter. My handle is at terra harrison. You can also support us on Patrion www.patrion.com/mate. More love, not war.
Speaker 6
Thanks for listening.