[Part Ten of a Twelve-Part Series, “A Roadmap to Freedom”]
2018 — my first full year in Los Angeles — felt in many ways like starting over. And although it began on a wobbly note, I had some footing by the time summer rolled around. Through twelve step meetings, I was slowly learning how to heal and transform shame. In men’s groups, I was learning how to trust other guys for the first time. And through dabbling with psychedelics, I’d had a taste of an unconditional, heart-opening love for myself and for the world I didn’t know was possible. Perhaps most poignantly, I was — finally — meeting the authentic version of me that existed behind the carefully constructed facade I’d protected myself with for years.
My days were packed to the gills with friends, meaningful connections and even some cosmic synchronicities. But all the while, something felt like it was missing. Ever since Julie and I had ended things between us in the desert, I was low. In the evenings, watching the sun set over the rolling hills of Elysian Park from my living room window, I felt a deep sense of emptiness. I had to admit that without a woman in my life, I didn’t feel like being here.
One afternoon, an old magazine buddy from New York, Scott, invited me to lunch at a little café on Sunset Boulevard that had just opened. We sat down in the crowded space, ordered, and were deep in conversation when a beautiful girl wearing a red beret came out of the kitchen carrying our food. As she put our lunch on the table, she looked me square in the eye and winked. “Who was that!?” I asked Scott after she’d walked away. “That’s Stephanie,” he told me. “She’s one of the owners of this place.”
My crush on Stephanie filled me with a renewed hope. Most afternoons — after I’d finished writing for the day — I’d walk down to her café for lunch with the hopes of spotting her, or stealing a few seconds with her as she worked. Stephanie was clearly an impressive woman: smart, creative, ambitious and driven. Well-established in the same city where I still felt like an outsider. I placed her on a pedestal in my mind and spent my days fantasizing about her and the life we’d create together if only I could gather up the courage to speak more than a sentence to her.
Finally, in September, I slipped Stephanie a piece of paper with my phone number and our whirlwind love affair began — as all good romances do — with much excitement and expectation. But just a month or two into our relationship, a seemingly random event would occur that would shake everything up:
My mother came to visit Los Angeles.
It was the first time I’d seen Mom since I’d quit booze several months before, and from the moment her and my stepfather arrived, I felt suffocated by her presence. I began experiencing horrible anxiety, impatience and a totally new and raw emotion for me: Anger. For the first time in my life, I struggled to stuff down my building rage. As such, our much-anticipated family trip to the desert, for my cousin’s wedding in Joshua Tree, was a disaster. Turns out our buddy Ram Dass was right (“If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family.”) Here I was: this twelve stepping, men’s group advocate who meditated and journaled about his deepest feelings. And yet I was practically homicidal at the sight of my unsuspecting mother.
The next step on my journey had officially arrived.
Famed author and teacher Joseph Campbell thought of The Hero’s Journey (a major influence for this ol’ roadmap) as a circle—an out-and-back loop that brings our hero to the very ends of himself: he suffers a death, is reborn, and must make the long trek back to the world he knows with the wisdom he has earned.
But getting home for our weary traveler is far from a picnic: even after all the inward wins we’ve compiled in Parts Eight and Nine — we’re still wobbly, still feelin’ things out. So Part Ten is the perfect time to have our moral foundation tested again, and in an unprecedented and perilous way.
Placed in the context of “men’s work,” — or perhaps more specifically the archetypal journey discussed at length by Mythopoetic OGs like Robert Bly (Iron John), Sam Keen (Fire in the Belly), and Robert Moore (King Warrior Magician Lover) — Part Nine is the stage where we begin building the bridge back to other men, a crucial and healing step in every man’s journey. As Gatsbys, the majority of us did not receive healthy mirroring or guidance from our fathers or other elder men — that is how we ended up buying into the wounded masculine archetypes that run our patriarchal society. We came to believe that a real man piles up acquisitions, money, lovers, worldly success, and that leads to fulfillment. And, as many of us have now realized, this is a lie that perpetuates a cycle of dysfunction and pain. To break free, we have to “unlearn” these ways of being a man by connecting to other men in a real and vulnerable way, slowly eroding the systems we were brought into.
One of the most transformative aspects of men’s groups — as I’ve witnessed — is that men begin to see themselves clearly. In our ordinary worlds, most of us walk around in an existence that reflects back to us our own deep seated beliefs of unworthiness. But now, surrounded by a loving circle of fellow brothers, we begin to see our value extends below surface level. We begin to see that our whole selves are valid, allowing ourselves to feel and be witnessed in our anger, grief, and confusion in the safety of other men. We may even — as I described last time — begin to put ourselves first, and really show kindness to ourselves. This is a huge step to becoming healed and whole men. But it is only one important half of the work.
I believe the male inward journey is two-pronged:
1.) We must address The Father (or Masculine) Wound — which is healed slowly and integrated through being willing to drop our guard, express our feelings, and rebuild trust in the company of other men.
2.) Then, with that foundation in place, we can have the support and freedom to tackle the more intimidating side of inner work for a man: To look to the The Mother (or Feminine) Wound. And subsequently — regardless of our sexual preferences — our romantic relationships.
Ick, right? What idiot would ever willingly dive into the psychic stew of unpacking our sexual relationships by looking to our relationship with Mom? (Sooo Norman Bates of us.) But a man’s relationship with his mother sets the template for every relationship he will have in his life, including his relationship with the world at large. If he fears his mother, he will fear the world. If his mother was unavailable to him because of her own issues, he will stand on shaky ground, overcompensating through an attempt to control his surroundings. If he anticipated abandonment, or received little to no feminine nurturing, he will struggle to exist without validation from a romantic partner — even ones he does not truly want to be with — which serves no one.
Gatsbys, as we saw in Part One, all have an original loss—an abandonment wound that we cover up through building as strong an outer shell as possible to protect us from being hurt again. This shell keeps us safe, but at the same time, it cuts us off from our emotions, and from fully experiencing life. As we break down this shell, however, and learn to open our hearts, we come alive. But we also encounter great pain. And no pain of the heart is greater to uncover than a lack of childhood nurturing.
So many Gatsby men, in the absence of their father’s guidance or presence, come to rely on our connection to Feminine energy as a means of survival. We may shift ourselves to accommodate our mothers moods, we may learn to “read the room” to the point of hyper-vigilance, and we may silence our true needs and wants as a means of being palatable to the one person’s attention we crave and need.
In surviving this way, we never learn what our deeper needs are. So ultimately, the Mother Wound manifests as a man’s lack of understanding on how to nurture himself. Sure, we try to keep ourselves satiated and relaxed in the usual — and societally acceptable — ways. We fire up a joint, play video games until we go numb, shop or work tirelessly, or scroll porn sites late at night. But those nervous system calming modes of false-nurturing actually keep us further from the nurturing we do need.
For many Gatsbys, relationships and sex are the number one way we fill the Mother Wound. And, as a result, our romantic relationships —whether with women or men—become ‘motherly’ in nature. (Not a sexy thing.) These relationships are often filled with anger towards our partners for not knowing instinctively what we need, expecting them to read our minds, or, effectively, Mother us. But at the same time being unwilling to articulate our needs (or perhaps even know what we need to begin with.) So around and around we go in the same carousel of dysfunction until we find our way into circles of men and women who can teach us how to nurture ourselves — and our inner little boys — in a real and helpful way.
If we’re lucky, we arrive here at Part Ten. More than a little humbled. More than a bit frustrated. And that’s the point. Because to truly embrace this mark on the journey, we must be willing to look at an emotion that — up until this time in our journey — has largely been avoided. We must be willing to look at anger.
Many of us well-meaning Gatsbys have, in our typical artful fashion, managed to avoid anger for the majority of our lives. We hold it as a scary emotion: remembering the wrath our fathers or mothers would unleash, or the intense violence we saw on TV, in movies, or in news headlines, and said ‘Nah, not me. I won’t be that.’ We swallow it, classing it as a wild, and out of control emotion. (Remember Part Five?) So by the time Part Ten comes around, we’ve got some work to do and some more feeling to feel.
“But what are we angry about? 'I’m not angry.” Would be a good follow-up here. And it will be slightly different for every man. That’s why this is a good stage on our journey to sit for a while with questions like these:
What really, really pisses me off?
What triggers me the most with my romantic partner(s)?
What about my mother? My family? The world?
Have I ‘lost it’, or ‘blown up’ recently? What happened?
Who do I hate? Why?
What grudges do I hold onto?
When I feel angry, what calms me down?
Do I watch pornography? If so, how might it feel if I stopped?
Do I date out of boredom/loneliness? If so, how might it feel if I stopped?
Do I drink, shop, watch shows/TV, play video games, or use drugs excessively? If so, how might it feel if I stopped?
Are my ways of nurturing helping or hurting me? Are they addictive?
Am I afraid of anger/confrontation? If so, why?
When do I feel out of control?
When do I feel helpless or powerless?
I find with many men — and with myself — the core of our anger relates back to the lack of nurturing we received when we really needed it — our childhoods. Phrases that often come alive in the throes of anger work include:
Where were you when I needed you?
Why didn’t you ask me what was going on?
You never listened to me.
I hate you for doing that to me.
Get away from me.
Fuck you.
All are natural and normal. And the answer, of course, is to find safe and intentional spaces to get back in touch with these feelings we’ve repressed, often for decades. This isn’t necessarily fun, but it is — as I’ve found it — a relief. (Here’s a recent IG post I did on working constructively with anger for reference.)
Anger is a healthy human emotion. It’s our life force. It’s our vitality. It’s our sexual and creativity energy. And while we’re repressing it, not only do we invite the opportunity of blowing up on someone we love (The ol’ Volcano moment like I had with my Mom in the Mojave) and causing un-repairable rupture to a relationship, we do ourselves the most harm of all: repressed anger has been proven again and again to lead to a myriad of issues that plague modern guys: cancer, heart disease, general inflammation, depression, anxiety and suicide.
So, let it out fellas! (And email me if you're looking for tips on how to do it.)
My mother’s trip to Los Angeles would signal the beginning of my becoming more aware of my repressed anger and ultimately, healing my Mother (Feminine) Wound. But it was downright ugly when the dam burst: Stephanie — who I moved in with after just four months of dating — got the brunt of it. I remember a sunny January morning in particular when Stephanie confronted me about some dirty breakfast dishes I’d left in the sink. “Get away from me,” I told her, my whole body shaking, my vision red. “I really want to hurt you right now.”
At times, it seemed like everything she did or said sent me into a rage. And while my brain knew it was all projection — that my anger was the result of decades of swallowing my emotions in an attempt to try to please the world, please my mother and stepmother, and ultimately, be a likable guy who didn’t ruffle anyone’s feathers — it didn’t make working with it any easier. Slowly, the resentment I couldn’t express eroded Stephanie’s and my relationship until I ended things between us and moved out.
I was hurt and ashamed and confused. And I tried everything in the coming months to pacify all the anger that was arising inside me: First, I went on a wilderness fast, where for 5 days and nights I tried to starve my rage away. Then I moved into an ashram in Los Angeles for the summer to try to meditate it away. (Hilariously, many of my fellow meditators were women in their 50s and 60s — my mother’s age — and their mere presence sent me into a sidespin almost daily.) I also joined a seemingly innocuous graduate program in Spiritual Psychology at The University of Santa Monica, only to walk into my first day to find 150 women classmates, many of whom would test me in various ways in the next three years.
By the fall of 2019, I felt helpless on my quest to heal my Mother wound. So I called the one man I knew would know what to do next: John Lee, my guide and mentor from Part Four. It was in John’s living room in Austin, Texas that I realized that I had to take my most intentional look yet at my relationships with all the women in my life. John said as long as I had unresolved feelings inside me towards Amy, Stephanie, my mother, my stepmother, and other women from my past, I would continue to carry that rage and hurt into any relationship I had with a woman going forward. I would continue to act like a petulant boy when how I wanted to show up was like a conscious man.
“Son, you gotta go where you don’t wanna go,” John said to me, in his Alabama drawl. “You have to confront what you don’t want to confront.”
I remember being scared that day, but hopeful. I knew there were some uncomfortable conversations I needed to have, some amends to make, and many more feelings to feel. I knew it would be messy. But fuck it, I knew the alternative was just more suffering and more dysfunction. I’d been down that road a thousand times.
So I flew back to Los Angeles, and began planning another epic descent into my past, into my psychic basement, and into my demons. One last tour through Hell! (Or so I thought.)
But we’ll have to cover that business next time.
(Part Eleven will be published on Dec. 26th.)