In last week’s Naked Man installment, I made reference to being existentially sick and tired before leaving California a few weeks ago. Why I was sick and tired is a Herculean explanation, but I’ll jump right in and do my best:
For most of the past year, I was in a volatile relationship with a woman in Los Angeles. Katherine and I met in October of 2022, sparks flew, and we began hooking up in November. A few weeks into the relationship, both of us were tossing red flags: She was still processing a recent breakup, emotionally unavailable and closed off to love. Meanwhile, I hadn’t really been alone since 2005 and was beginning to see that was a huge problem. Both of us knew this wasn’t the relationship we needed, but we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. (What did John Mayer once call his relationship with Jessica Simpson? Sexual napalm? Yeah, it was like that.)
Why our physical connection was so potent I’ll never know exactly. But it was as if both mine and Katherine’s early attachment traumas seemed to collide perfectly in an orgy of intensity and passion. I was her dad! She was my mom! It was glorious! It was a mess! So even as my brain said No to Katherine, my body said Yes. Again and again. Six months passed and I couldn’t let her go. Nine months passed and we were still sleeping together. By the time August rolled around, I was on my knees. It was painful to watch. Here I was, a successful men’s coach helping other guys break through their challenges and overcome their unhelpful patterns, but I was totally stuck in my own. At times, I was brutally hard on myself. At others, I adopted an attitude of denial and ambivalence. (Fuck around and find out, right?) But the only thing I was finding out was how powerless I was over this woman.
My pattern of feeling powerless in the face of women wasn’t new. I’ve struggled with addictive patterns around sex and relationships for most of my life. As the only child of a depressed single mom, I lived in constant fear of abandonment, and by 10 or 11, I figured out masturbation was a great salve for the anxiety, so I did it a lot. I’d get lost for hours in my fantasies, and then, like many teenage boys, in online porn. (Which really fucks our chemistry up.) Since I was shy and self conscious, I didn’t get into actual romance until later on in high school when alcohol finally opened the door to dating and sex. When it did, it was like I’ve heard many a junkie say: “I knew from my first hit, I was in trouble.” And I knew the first time I ended up in bed with a woman, I was fucked. Desire was the best drug I’d ever experienced.
Flash forward 10 years to New York City and I’m operating as a full blown sex and romance addict. And thanks to dating apps and my on-the-town job as a GQ writer, I’ve always got a full rotation of potential hookups at my fingertips. In these days, every conquest still leaves me feeling warm, fuzzy and powerful the following morning. These are the good days of an addiction—when the drug is still working and you feel in control. But this period can’t last forever. Because, in 2012, I meet Amy.
Amy is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever dated — on the surface, she checks every conceivable box for 29-year-old me: she’s cool and funny and super sexual. Our adventures around the world together are highly Instagrammable. (It felt kinda icky to write that.) So, although it becomes clear after a few months of dating that we aren’t compatible as life partners, my infatuation manages to span years of painful breakups, euphoric makeups and finally a last ditch move to California in 2017, where I finally call things off.
Woof.
The aftermath of my relationship with Amy leaves me totally disoriented and ashamed, and I make a silent vow to myself: there is no way I’m ever letting this happen again. So, most woman I date in the coming years are, for the most part, more into me than I am into them—not ultimately very satisfying, but safer than ever feeling as helpless as I felt with Amy.
Try as I do to put Amy behind me in the coming years, though, I can’t: I keep old pictures of her on my laptop. I hold onto clothes she gave me. I fantasize about her and our future reconciliation almost daily. And the shame of this inability to let go — not to mention now knowing for a fact that I’m able to toss my entire life, logic, and sanity away for a woman — only grows. It’s a dark cloud over my ego, my self confidence, and my life as a whole. And the shame pushes me further away from authentic connection with others and from my true self. How could I ever own this terrible weakness? Why can’t I just be alone?
Eventually, I begin making public cries for help. This piece, in Esquire, in June of 2021, pins my addictive tendencies with women on my deceased father’s own womanizing. Which, while partly true, doesn’t take full ownership for my own pattern, a pattern that was still alive and well. In fact, just a day after it was published, I entered into a lusty relationship with a 20-something woman I met on the dating app, Raya. (Queue more sexual napalm.) Again, though I knew we had no future as a couple, I couldn’t stop going to her apartment a few nights a week. On the drive to her place, I’d be giddy, euphoric. And on the way home, I’d be depressed and ashamed. I knew I was on borrowed time. The discomfort of my dependency on desire had long outweighed the returns. I was frustrated, and I hated myself. But I couldn’t stop.
All the material I read on sex and love addiction over the years (a la Patrick Carnes, Ken Adams, and their acolytes) was illuminating, but mostly took a clinical approach of ‘managing’ these unhealthy behaviors through talk therapy, and twelve-step programs. It was the same approach I’d seen years ago taken to alcohol and drugs, and I knew it provided temporary relief, but didn’t offer a true solution: I’d been in countless AA meetings with both men and women who hadn’t drank in 30 years, but still called themselves alcoholics and obsessed over their drinking pasts. That wasn’t freedom. The alcohol still had the power. Even the language didn’t work for me: We admitted we were powerless… Personally, I didn’t want to be powerless over anything.
So I chose to follow my intuition to a more effective way to get free from my compulsions. And along the way, I’ve come to believe that all addiction is the result of an attempt to numb or escape unprocessed, unintegrated trauma. And that, once we’re able to experience (i.e. feel) this trauma through to integration in a safe space with a facilitator, we’re freed from needing to engage in whatever behavior that we once used to cover it up. This is true freedom.
For example: I found that once I had processed enough early childhood trauma around my social anxiety, the need for alcohol — which had always been my crutch to feel comfortable in social situations — went away completely. I can now choose freely to have a glass of wine, or not. (More often than not, I choose not to.) I’m in control of the substance. Not the other way around.
I knew the same thing was possible for my addiction to sex and romance, so in January of 2022, I began doing a lot of intentional, trauma-focused work with plant medicines like sassafras, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and others in an effort to open up my heart, and experience the self love and attunement that I knew was the answer to letting go of seeking validation through women. These 12-15 journeys I did in 2022 did wonders for opening me up to layers of previously unreachable trauma, and I was able to use the community aspect of the journeys to heal some relational wounds as well with both women and men.
In addition to the plant work, I committed to a year of working with a men’s coach named Bryan Reeves in an effort to do some additional healing on my father wound — which can be a big block for us men. Simply put: if we do not trust and have vulnerable relationships with other men, we’ll rely solely on our relationships with women as sources of validation. This tends to place too much pressure on our primary love partnerships and creates a depolarizing effect that crushes chemistry, among other problems. With Bryan, I learned to love and open up to new men again. And with that deeper connection to men in place, I began to experiment with better boundaries around my relationships with women. This was the era I cut out pornography entirely, as well as walked away from several relationships with clearly unavailable women — a first for me.
But it has been my work with a coach named Allana Pratt that has most directly addressed my “mother wound” and my lifelong, dysfunctional relationship to women. Allana calls herself an Intimacy Expert, and from the moment we first met, I knew this strong and lovely woman was the coach who was going to help me heal my addictive romance patterns for good. Allana’s work — which we began in July of 2022 — bypasses the mind and goes straight to any trauma trapped energetically in the body (something my own body was well-primed for after over a decade of engaging with practically every kind of healing modality.) Our sessions would begin with Allana saying: “What’s present for you right now?” And into the body we’d go — tracking the energy, and where there were roadblocks and ruptures. (This straight-to-the-body energetic work also revolutionized the work I was able to do with my coaching clients. I found that after working through an emotional block with Allana, I was able to help a client work through a similar block, sometimes just hours later.)
The more Allana and I dug into my unprocessed emotion and the more we integrated, the freer and more comfortable I felt in my own skin, and the more my dysfunctional patterns with women began to collapse. About the time I jumped in with Allana, I reconnected with an ex, Rachel. Rachel and I had met on Instagram the previous winter, and began an intense, long distance affair. But, just a month or so into our relationship, she pulled away to date another man. I was crushed. Now, she’d re-emerged saying she was ready and wanted me back.
I had my doubts. And, sure enough, the relationship with Rachel went south quickly. It was clear to me now, looking through a new lens of a more integrated body, mind and heart — that she could not give me what I wanted. So, while the intensity of our physical connection was electrifying, per usual, I began making my preparations to walk away. “I think it’s finally time to stop this crazy cycle,” I remember telling my friend James on a night out for dinner in Santa Monica last September. “After Rachel, I’m going to commit to being alone for a while.” But, of course, just a few days later, I went to a friend’s bonfire in Topanga and walked smack into Katherine…
I remember the October morning Katherine and I met for our first hiking “date” in our neighborhood. I remember her rounding the corner, her big smile, the tights she wore accentuating her long, beautiful legs. Oh my god, I thought, she looks just like Amy.
Sure enough, the infatuation I fell into with Katherine was eerily reminiscent of Amy’s and my early days in New York. I was euphoric — maybe things would work out this time! Maybe I’d get everything I ever wanted! But my body knew the truth. When I would leave Katherine’s house after a supercharged night of lovemaking, I would begin sobbing on the way home. At first, the intense grief scared me. But then I began to piece it together. I knew that whatever core trauma I’d been working to heal with Allana that formed the base of this addiction to women was coming up to be healed, and that Katherine — my biggest cosmic test yet — had appeared in my life to finish the job. But it was all happening faster than I could have imagined.
Months go by, during which I call things off with Katherine seven or eight times, and take her back each time again. It’s just too hard to imagine letting her go. In the middle of July, however, a dear friend and client of mine comes to Topanga to visit. While touring him around my home, I get the intuition that I need to leave—if I’m really going to heal for good, I need to get as far away from Katherine as possible for a while to do it.
So I start making preparations to leave LA, but the stress of leaving Katherine and my addictive pattern with women behind begins to break my body down. By the time I hit the road for the East Coast on September 1st (my birthday), I’m sick and exhausted, so exhausted that I call Allana from Austin, Texas, and tell her I can’t make it to North Carolina where we’ve planned to do a 2-day guided psi (psychedelic somatic integration) journey that both of us know will be game-changing for me. Allana is kind, but direct: “I think this is one of those times, love,” she says. “That you need to push through.”
The remainder of the road trip is nothing less than spiritual warfare, as I make my way across the Southern US (on the same route Amy and I took 6 years earlier on our drive west from New York), and when I finally arrive to the woods and lakes of Western North Carolina, where Allana is living, I am exhausted. But it is there, on the bed of a little lake cottage nestled in the pines, that I feel my way through and integrate the most challenging woman-related trauma I’ve faced to date. At the end of the two days, I feel like I’ve banished countless demons from my system, collapsing an ancient pattern. I am light and euphoric. Miraculously, the full-body sickness that almost broke me down in Austin just days before is nowhere to be found.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through doing deep, inner work for all these years, it’s that the universe has an incredible sense of humor. So, of course, at the culmination of this journey to heal my addictive patterns with women, the house I’d been planning to spend September writing at in Northern Maine fell through, and I ended up in Florida at my mother’s home, under the same roof with the woman who set the template for how I relate to all women.
You cannot make this shit up.
To say it’s been enlightening here in Florida would be an understatement. With a lot of unease, I’ve seen how years of unconscious rage and grief at the perceived crimes of my young, single mother led to punishing the women I loved for the same “crimes”, and how those buried feelings served as a magnet to attract women who would hurt me in the same ways my mother did years ago. Both Amy and Katherine were sad, beautiful women fresh out of breakups, just like my mother had been during my most formative years. Getting their love felt like finally getting hers, which made it highly charged and euphoric, but doomed from the start. Just like I couldn’t go back to childhood and get the “perfect” love I wanted from my mother, I couldn’t get the “perfect” love I wanted from these women either. And I’ve had to feel that devastation all the way through to finally understand that there’s only one person who can give myself that love: Me.
Humbling stuff.
I was on a wonderful podcast called What’s the Point? a few weeks ago (listen here), and Jasmin, one of the co-hosts, asked me a question about the mother wound. And I’ve come to believe that the mother wound is the universal law that states that: Any unresolved trauma within a man’s body and psyche from his relationship with his mother will play out in his life and romantic relationships until he chooses to address it.
On a collective scale, we’re looking right now at a world that has been dominated for decades by the unconscious rage, grief, and confusion that an unaddressed mother wound yields. (Not through the fault of any particular role in this dynamic (I believe we’re ALL always trying our best), but through the unfortunate facts of the familial and relational system we’ve all co-created over the last hundred or so years.)
I also believe that it is our responsibility, as men, to address our own individual wounds as a way of healing this collective dynamic. Women have their own work to do, their own rage, grief, and confusion to parse through. But if every man were to honestly assess his attitudes towards women, and the harmful programming he grew up ingesting, he would surely find a thread back to his earliest days. Our relationship with our mother forms the template where we learn what love is, which is no small thing. And if that relationship is ruptured in any way, we’re going to have some strong feelings about it.
Mother wounds are so prevalent in men of my generation, because of the lack of healthy father energy in the world, and the lack of integrated, healthy men to shepherd boys from childhood to manhood. Without this considered initiation, boys stay glued to women (sort of an energetic umbilical cord), which creates a host of problems in our adult lives: from addiction (what is addiction but an attachment to comfort, to the mother?) to anxiety, depression, and confusion over our identities. Most of all though, an unattended mother wound leads to a suppression of our life force, and a general feeling of stuck-ness — probably the #1 gripe of the modern man. So many of us don’t know who we are or where we’re going, because we’ve spent our lives trying to be what we think women want.
Having lived this dynamic out in my own life, I am passionate about bringing light to it. I see no greater mission in this world at this time than properly initiating men—empowering them on a path to a healthy, integrated version of masculinity that supports, as opposed to stifles, their relationships with themselves, women and the world at large. These are the men we need now more than ever.
So I’m here in Florida, reporting live from the epicenter of my own dysfunctional (albeit well-meaning) upbringing. Making the effort to heal what needs to be healed, letting go of what needs to be let go of, and shifting these patterns in my own life so I can best be of service to any man who relates to this article and wants to learn more or make changes. It’s a wild ride into the heart of the mother wound, to be sure. And not always fun. But I know that anytime I face something super uncomfortable like this, there’s always a ton of freedom on the other side. And the flicker of that freedom keeps me going.
I’m confident there’s a new chapter on the horizon. A chapter where I create healthy boundaries around my time, energy, and desires. A chapter where I regain my power and sacredness in all facets of my life, including romance and sexuality. But that shift, of course, comes with mourning the loss of the old. It’s been a month since I’ve had any contact with Katherine, and most days, I’ve been grieving pieces of her, of Amy, and of my old way of being. External validation was the driving force of my life for decades. Being a desirable guy, a seductive guy, a guy women wanted or needed —that was the identity my own mother-wound created. And without it, I’ll be honest, some days I don’t even know who I am.
But there’s something else happening, too. Ever so slowly, ever so persistently, there is new hope and new energy coming in. New beginnings can be daunting, no doubt. But in this fresh start, I feel I finally have the opportunity to discover who the real Me is. The Me that always existed behind the role I believed I needed to play to survive.
I look forward to introducing him to you-
-Sean
Wonderful vulnerability in your writing. So many things that I resonate with. Thanks for shedding some light.
each one of these i read that deal with your sexual escapades do make me a bit envious even if that is far from ideal. Being middle aged and never really being romantically desired has taken its toll on me. My own journey has been ongoing for a while now with the help of professionals, friends (male, female, non-binary, trans, etc), medicinal, and reading material including your recommendation of The Flying Boy.