Maggie:
Hello, everyone. I am so excited to have a very special guest with us today. His name is Tom Golden and he has written what I believe is an absolutely life changing landmark book called The Way Men Heal. Now, this book is not brand new, but I just read the book, so it’s brand new to me. I read it a couple of weeks ago and I have become obsessed with it. I have recommended it to several of my coaching clients to my coaching friends. Last night, I was literally talking with a friend about something completely unrelated and I said, Hey, by the way, you have to get this book. I have been talking about the book for the last couple of weeks. So one of the things that I teach my clients and I talk about it in the podcast all the time is how our partners process the world differently than you do. And what this book does so brilliantly, what Tom does was such a degree of excellence and simplicity that is so powerful is he explains in really simply clear ways, what are some of those ways that many men process emotion and how it can be so different from the way that many women process emotion? So it is my supreme honor to have Tom on the show today to share his work with you. Welcome.
Tom:
Well, thank you, Maggie. What a nice introduction.
Maggie:
My pleasure. So tell us a little bit about your work, what you do and what inspired you to write The Way Men Heal?
Tom:
I got started working as a therapist back in the 1970s, and I went to work at this center for death and dying. And I found out very quickly that I was the only male therapist there. There was like 17 women and one guy that was me. And so all of the men who came to that center came to me because the women said, Golden’s a man, he’ll figure it out, let him deal with it. But one of the guys came to me and I didn’t know what to do because I’d been taught in school, you sit and you face each other and you talk about emotions and you talk about the past. And when I did this with women, it worked like charms, great you know. But when I tried it with men, it was like something wasn’t working. And so I realized that I had to find out what’s going on here.
Tom:
And so I bumped into this cross cultural research on indigenous tribes and the way they deal with emotions and deal with grief. And man, it just woke me up because what I saw over and over again, was these indigenous people who give the men something to do, following a death, will give them an action. They take care of the body. They dig the grave, they build the casket. They do the eulogy, I mean, whatever. In their form, they would give the men something to do, and give the women a place, a safe place to emote and connect. And the more I saw that, the more I started thinking, Holy crap, that’s what’s going on here. Yeah. But guess what? We’ve subcontracted all of the things to do after a death. We pay someone else to take care of the body, we pay someone else to take care of building the coffin, we pay someone else to even do the sermon, you know. So, it’s left men with nothing to do in our culture.
Tom:
And when I started realizing it after this was a long period of time, I started realizing that men would use action to heal just like these indigenous men do, but it would be in a way that people really couldn’t see very well because we don’t have rituals for grief. We don’t have rituals to deal with our emotions. Like these age, old indigenous people have these wonderful ways to deal with emotions. We don’t have that, so it left the men with needing to be very creative in things. And that’s what I found them to be is extraordinarily creative. Once I realized that they were different, I accepted that. Then I started seeing them for what they were
Maggie:
That is so powerful. And one of the things that happened for me as I was reading the book was the book was really focused on grief and how men process grief and obviously, we’ll talk about that today. But through my lens, as a life coach, working with women’s juggling in their marriages and often having a lot of intense emotions in a relationship. Every time I read anything about grief, I added – and any intense emotion, this is very, very common in a lot of when a man has to process something, he doesn’t necessarily process it the way a woman does. Right. And what I try to cultivate so much in my clients and in everyone who listens to this show is compassion for maybe we’re doing differently. Maybe we don’t do it the same way you do it. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing it. And that doesn’t mean that we can’t find a way to like love, heal, connect with each other.
Tom:
Exactly. Yeah.
Maggie:
Yeah. So you mentioned the, those indigenous grief rituals where you just sort of saw grief being processed almost like naturally organically, right? Without like our parameters of what’s right and wrong in society being added into that. And once you saw the way that they process with action and women process with the safe space to connect, you mentioned that there’s something about interaction action and inaction. You made this distinction around the safety of action for men and how women tend to move more towards people and interaction when they’re processing intense grief or intense emotion and men tend to move more towards action or inaction. Could you tell us a little bit about that action and inaction that they tend to move towards?
Tom:
So the action is just something that helps them tell the story of the loss. And by the way, grief is literally about all loss. I’m not talking about just someone dying. If your sports team loses, it’s a little teeny, bit of grief, the experts are calling this micro-grief, these things can build up. These little micro griefs can build up over and over again, but men will tend to move towards this action. Just like these men did in these indigenous tribes. You know, I saw the, one of the things they had men do was they’d have the men sing the life of the person who died. Imagine that. You go to a funeral and what they do is they split it up so that one man would sing certain years, another man would sing this event and one would sing his early age. So imagine going to a funeral home and being responsible to sing the life of the person who died. This is an action they did, but can you see how that would incorporate all of this emotion, how could you sing that life without boom, just having the emotion there.
Tom:
The difference is that it’s a matter of telling the story, you know, grief boils down to being able to tell the story. Women tend to use words and men tend to use actions. You can think of Eric Clapton after his son died, what did he do? He didn’t join a support group. He may have, but I haven’t heard him talk about it. What he does talk about is, he says, my guitar was my salvation. He spent almost all his time, either in AA meetings or playing his guitar. He talks about how three songs started to evolve. And those three songs were all about his grief. You know, Tears In Heaven was one most people know about My Father’s Eyes was one fewer people know about. And the least people know about is one called The Circus Left Town, which is a song about how Clapton had taken his son, the son was a four year old who died the day before, having taken him to the circus. The song is about how that one trip to the circus is going to have to last a lifetime.
Tom:
Can you imagine writing that song, he talks about that immersion into emotions, immersion in the loss through an action. Here’s a clue. You’re Eric Clapton’s spouse, right? What do you do? Do you say, Eric, how are you feeling today? What do you say Eric how are the songs doing? Yes. If you say Eric, how are the songs doing? He’s going to open like a book right there. Boom. And better yet if you say Eric, I’ve got some things that I think we could add to the song. If you incorporate in something with his action, he’s going to harmonize with that ladies, he’s going to say she understands. If she asked him to just sit in a circle and talk about it, boom, you’re going to get silence, all kinds of reasons for that. Which I hope we time to talk about today.
Maggie:
I’d love to absolutely. I have to tell you, I read the book and then I said, I’m going to test this on my husband, as I often do. And I went and I asked him about his day, right. With his team. So my husband’s an engineer. He has a team and they work on all these projects. And I know for a fact, if I would have asked my husband, you know, how are you feeling? You would have said fine. That would have been the end of it. I asked him how the day went with his team said, Oh, we did this. We did that. And then this was disappointing and this person did this thing. And then this was great. Somebody figured this out. We had a whole conversation. And the whole time I was tracking, look at all the feelings he has shared all of the things just in a normal day, just, you know, and my husband has been on the show and he’s talked about different things about our marriage. I told him, I read this book, and I just tested it on you. And it totally works. It’s amazing. That was his reaction. He was so amused. He was like, okay, I love it. Keep asking me stuff. That was fun.
Tom:
Yes, because you asked about his action. That’s easy for him to talk about. You know, when my father died, a group of men, my brother and a group of men built the box for his ashes. But that week as we were building the box we told stories about my dad. The tears in the workshop were sucked up by the sawdust you know. But, as we worked together, it was easy to talk about him. They’d tell us stories about recent stuff. We’d tell him about what it was like when we were kids. And if you’d taken that same group of men sat him in the living room in a circle and said, talk about your feelings about this man. Nothing would have come out. We would have been, uh, or, uh, or, uh, we would felt uncomfortable. Put us in the workshop. We’d feel good about it. That’s our safe place, and that’s why talking is women’s safe place.
Maggie:
So let’s talk about that a little bit. Because in the book you explained something that I also thought was really powerful, which is we’re using generalities today that most men have this experience and most women have this experience, but you mentioned brain differences and testosterone, and the really, there’s a percentage of women who do process through action. And there’s a percentage of men to process through words. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Tom:
Yeah. It’s so important to know that we’re all different. I mean, the variability in people is just so incredible. And if you hear people say there’s no gender differences and in some ways they’re right. You know that there’s more similarities than there are differences, but there are some really important differences that exist. And they start early Maggie. They start two months in utero. There’s two months in utero, most boys probably, I think 80% of boys get a flood of testosterone. This is in the mother’s tummy, right? This flood of testosterone changes their brain. It changes it into what they’re calling a male brain or a system’s brain. Cause they’ve found that the strong male brain is interested in systems. What makes things tick? If I take this piece out, what will happen? If I put this piece in what will happen?
Tom:
Think about it now, a male brain is it going to want to talk about his feelings or is it going to want to do something an action? But the important thing is this testosterone flood doesn’t happen only in guys. It happens to a lesser degree in some women and girls. So they then get more of a male brain because of this testosterone flood. And we call these young girls tomboys. How many of us know tomboys? They love to climb trees. They love to play sports with the boys. They are rowdy and active, they’re pushy you in some ways, kind of like the boys, this is all happening in utero.
Tom:
Oh, it’s mind blowing. And the media won’t tell you one word about it. But the research is out there clear as a bell, you know, they’ve honed it down now. There’s all kinds of things they know about what this stuff does. But one of the major factors they know for sure are that this testosterone flood effects our sexual orientation. Whether we want to sleep with men or women, it impacts our gender identity, but we see ourselves as male or female. It changes the way we play, you know, so that those who got the flood are going to play more like typical boy play, which is more coalitional play. If they don’t get the flood, they’re going to have more of a person to person kind of let’s play house kind of thing. Right. And the aggression piece, you know, there’s more aggression usually with the boys, particularly when they’re very young because this testosterone flood, I think that evens out later on, so that we’re both about the same aggressiveness, but an early flood impacts aggressiveness.
Maggie:
I think to a certain degree, it’s like we are predisposed to be more inclined as we’re talking about where women want to talk about things and process through the use of words and language and men process through actions. And we meet someone we fall in love with them and then we try to change this basic part of who they are.
Tom:
Well, I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s that we want to get to know them, we want to get close to them and the way we know how to get close, we try and make them do that. It’s not a mistake out of ignorance. It’s a mistake out of love. We want them to be closer, we say, well why can’t he talk about his feelings. I can’t tell you the workshops I give for women, mostly women but men come sometimes. By the end of the day, they come up to me and say, Tom, I can’t wait to go try this out.
Maggie:
That was me with the book. I was like, let me experiment right now.
Tom:
Women want to be close and they’ve never taught how to get close to men. No one’s ever sat them down and talked about it because no one really knows, you know, very few people know about this stuff.
Maggie:
And I can say, you know, I read a ton of marriage books and a ton of relationship books. And I, you know, I’m a person who has read more about this topic than most people. And when I came across your book, it was the first time that it put together what I instinctively already was teaching my clients from an instinctive point of view. It’s like, maybe not know how his brain works. Let’s assume it works differently. And that’s work with that. And let’s investigate that in your individual interpersonal relationship. But having this layer to add, to say this is one of the explanations you can use, right? So you have clarity about why it’s working this way. It was so massively powerful, which is why I was like, everyone needs to know. Everyone needs to know about this. Everyone needs to know. So one of the points you make in the book that I think is so, so important is invisibility of men’s pain and how men’s pain is taboo. And even as we want to get closer to them, because it’s taboo in the society we live in and the structures that we have, sometimes it’s even when we want to get closer, they either don’t know how to express it in a way we can understand, or we might even want to understand it and then judge it once we see it because of that taboo nature. Can you speak to that? Invisibility?
Tom:
Yeah. Well, you know, our culture in general, does not really like men’s pain. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. But most people have no idea that they have a bias against men and their emotions. I didn’t know that, but the more I studied it, the more I realized, Holy crap, I do have a bias. I am biased. I’d much rather help some lady than to help some guy. What the hell is going on here? Think about it. Maggie, I want you to imagine you’re going into your favorite restaurant. As you walk into your favorite restaurant, you’re being seated and over at the corner table there’s this woman crying. What’s the first thing comes to your mind?
Maggie:
I would just think she’s having a hard day or something like that.
Tom:
Poor dear, she’s upset. She needs support, right? Which is I do this, this little exercise with all the workshops I do. And it almost always, they say the same thing. These are therapists, right? Therapists say she’s upset, she needs support. How can I help poor dear. Now, erase that image. Okay. Walking into the same restaurant, except this time, it’s a guy sitting there that same corner table crying. What’s your first reaction.
Maggie:
The first thought came into my mind was he’s so brave to be sitting there crying in public, which didn’t cross my mind about the woman. With the woman it was just like, Oh, she’s just having a bad day. But the first thought I had was, Oh, he also must be having a bad day, but he’s so brave to sit and cry.
Tom:
Right. And would you have gone up to the woman who was crying?
Maggie:
So I tend to be one of those outliers that goes up to people for random reasons.
Tom:
And would you go up to the man?
Maggie:
I might, depending on the day,
Tom:
You are an outlier with this because I’m telling you most women, most therapists will say, Oh, poor dear. She’s upset. They come to the man and they go, holy crap the first thing I thought of was there’s something wrong with him. The next thing I thought of was how can I avoid him? How can I step around him? And most of the therapists say, he’s probably drunk or he’s out of control. And these are therapists talking. So you are an outlier. And most people will get the sense, the instinctual sense that I need to stay away from that there’s something toxic about it. Right? And there’s reasons why people see that as toxic. I’ve talked today a little bit about that, but that’s the first thing that keeps men’s pain invisible. Because imagine that in public, everyone wanted to sidestep your emotion and no one wanted to come up and talk to you and they thought something was wrong with you if you emoted. How would that impact whether you approach them or not?
Maggie:
First of all, I would imagine it would lead to a great deal of suppression of emotion. If I would be shunned by everyone for expressing any emotion, right. Expelled from the tribe, then I’d be like, how do I stay in the tribe? I better not show anybody what I’m feeling.
Tom:
Right. So you don’t show your emotions. You keep them quiet. And that’s exactly what men do. Men learn how to keep them quiet because no one wants to hear that crap, Maggie, nobody wants to hear it. Men know this, they’re not dumb enough to go out and emote in public. Because that’s lots of reasons why that’s the case. But one of the reasons is because the man’s pain is taboo. You know, I say a woman’s pain is a call to action. People want to do something. A man’s pain is taboo. People want to avoid it. Even women want to avoid it a lot of times.
Maggie:
Tell us about that, toxic. You said there’s a lot of reasons for that. Tell us about what those reasons are?
Tom:
Well, there’s another one is that the whole provide protect role for men. When you are the one who’s supposed to provide and protect you better not appear dependent. You better appear like you can get things done. You can get the job done, right? Imagine at three o’clock in the morning, you and your husband wake up to a loud sound downstairs. Something’s wrong. Right? Who goes down to check it out?
Maggie:
Oh, in my house it would for sure be my husband. I’m like the biggest scaredy cat ever.
Tom:
If you were saying, honey, can you go check that out? You’d be fine. Right? Yeah. And if you were to say, I’ll go check it out, honey, you’d be a hero. Right.
Maggie:
Probably, he’d be like, okay.
Tom:
Yeah, and if he says I’ll go check it out. He’s okay. If he says, no, I’m not checking that out tonight. I want you to go. What happens? Uh oh.
Maggie:
Yeah. In most cases I would say that would be an uh oh. We have a very unique relationship, which is like, I’m a life coach and he’s married to one. So we talk about all this stuff all the time. Right. And I’d be like, okay, we have a very team oriented relationship. And that’s one of the things I talk about on the show a lot is I’ll tell you very briefly because it’s something that a lot of people don’t realize is like a lot of marriages are alliances. While we have some same interests, I always use the UK in the US, while our interests are aligned we’re good. When our interests are not aligned, we’re out. Right. As opposed to something like the LA Lakers or here we have the Miami Marlins, right? We’re a team. We all want the same thing. We’re all going to the same place. Sometimes I work to your strengths. Sometimes I work on my strengths, but goal is for the team to win. So we have a very team spirit. So he told me in the middle of the night, would you check it out? I’d be team with him. That’d be like, yes, but that’s an exception. It’s not the most common thing.
Tom:
Oh Maggie you’re an outlier again. Most women would say, you go check it out, honey. And most men, if they had said to you all, I want you to go, they’re status would drop like a rock. There’s something wrong with that guy. He won’t go check out that sound. He expects her to do it? So men are locked into this role, think of a cop going to an accident, a terrible accident, right? Do you want him to stop and emote? Want him to stop and say, oh his accident is so terrible. Same thing with a fireman or a guy in the, in the Marines, want them to stop and say, Oh, I can’t. I got to cry first. No, you want them to get the job done. They are expected to get the job done first and then emote, and then deal with their stuff, whatever it is. And see, this is the pull of the provide-protect, to make sure that you get the job done first. After that, then you can, you know, maybe you can emote. Maybe you’re not going to be so interested in either. So that’s the whole of this provider role that still is onerous for men.
Maggie:
Yes. Yes.
Tom:
And we talk about, you know men being privileged, et cetera. We’ve got to really check that out because a lot of the things that men’s roles have always been are still happening. A lot of the things with women’s roles have shifted, but we allow women to have flexibility in their roles, now we do not allow that with men. Men are expected to provide-protect. They’re expected to get up in the middle of the night. They’re expected to produce income. Anyway, that’s number two.
Maggie:
Are there others? Tell me how many.
Tom:
The first is what we talked about, the taboo.
Maggie:
Yes. Yes.
Tom:
The third is the dominance hierarchy.
Maggie:
Yes. Tell us, tell us about that.
Tom:
Men live in a dominance hierarchy and almost no one knows about this. You know the bighorn sheep? Males will get 25, 20 feet apart and just run towards each other and bam hit each other in the head. Right. What are they doing, what are they doing? Maggie, do you know?
Maggie:
I don’t know.
Tom:
They are setting the male hierarchy and the guy who backs down the last one who doesn’t back down at all. He’s the alpha at the top of the list.
Maggie:
That’s what they’re dealing when they ram into each other. Okay.
Tom:
Then the male alpha gets the best access to the top rated sheep females, right? This is the way it is throughout nature when there is this kind of hierarchy going on. The men will compete in order to have access to the women. And there’s some fascinating things about that, but let’s get to the chase here because when you have this happen in nature, it also happens in men and women. Now it’s a lot more complicated for men and women because, you know, we have consciousness in a different kind of way than the animals do, but still we see that men will compete for women. This is ingrained. They want to compete for women. It’s not just the men doing this. The women will also compete with humans because it’s like we said, it’s more complicated. But women will compete by what, you know how the women compete?
Maggie:
How do the women compete, tell me.
Tom:
Oh come on, you know, women compete by trying to appear attractive. And the cosmetic industry is $64 billion. You know, this is a lot of money. The NFL, the NHL, and MLB altogether $32 billion, half of what the cosmetics industry is. It’s very, very important to women to want to appear as attractive as possible. And so when the woman says, no, I’m not going out, I don’t have my makeup on. Right. Everybody kind of understands that, Oh, she wants to appear as attractive as possible. Right? Think about the men. The men are trying to strive for status, right? And their status is based on what? Success, money, fame, power, height, all kinds of variables are tied into men’s status. And so men want to try and build up as much status as they can in order to get the girl.
Tom:
Now, does openly emoting give men high status? Nope. Openly emoting says you are a dependent man and that drops you like a rock. So men are going to strive for status. And as they strive for status, they’re going to try and avoid anything that would make them look less than independent. Independence is the key word with the hierarchy. The more, you can appear independent, the higher you are in the hierarchy. Someone who no one tells them what to do, say a multi billionaire, right? Yeah. Those guys are the most independent. They are the highest in status. So this is why you’ll see men wanting to not appear a dependant. Think about it. Why won’t men ask for directions?
Tom:
They’re not going to let people know they don’t know where they’re going, that would be a drop in status. The second thing is that would show they were dependent upon someone else to figure out where they needed to go. I remember a story of someone saying that a first time pilot, first time pilot, a Piper Cub kind of small plane went off for the first time solo. And he couldn’t find the airport. And rather than call them and say, look, I can’t find the airpor, he landed in a cornfield.
Maggie:
Oh my goodness. Lengths that we go to right?
Tom:
Yeah. Hierarchy is a part of that. And when women start understanding this, they will do a whole lot better with their young boys. Because the young boys know about this hierarchy. They will strive for status up and down. And if mom says, get the trash out now hierarchy has just been ignited and boys, it takes a different kind of approach for them to get them to do something rather than being directive and saying, you must do this now.
Maggie:
Do you have thoughts on how we start to dismantle that hierarchy? Like how do we react to it in a way that brings us closer together?
Tom:
Then you love him that he’s in a hierarchy. He may smile but he really wants to strive for status. Can you understand that? That’s what makes him different from you.
Maggie:
I love that. Yeah.
Tom:
This is literally the way we are built, we are built this way. It would be like saying, Oh, well, if you really want to love me, you’ll chop off your leg. No, you want him to be who he is. But you need to learn who he is first. You know? So, you know, women need to learn about the hierarchy, maybe learn about the dominance hierarchy. They need to learn about the striving for status and the provide-protect. The last thing ladies, you need to know that makes men’s pain invisible is our hormones. In that testosterone flood, one of the things that testosterone did is what they call testosterone priming. And so what happens is those people who get the flood, it primes all the receptors in the brain for later testosterone, it takes far less testosterone to ignite stuff in men than it does for women. Testosterone does so much more than that. You know, there’s all kinds of things that it does. And the first thing that’s so important is it’s not about violence. It’s not about aggression. Guess what they found out it’s about? It’s about striving for status. Can you see how it all fits together? The testosterone is pushing him in the hierarchy to strive and strive and strive. So it’s all about, I mean, the life is about getting the girl, right? This guy, what was his name? Watson or Crick, I forget which one, the Nobel winning scientist. One of his quotes is that there’s nothing he ever did in his scientific career or his personal life that wasn’t geared towards finding a pretty girl.
Maggie:
Everything he discovered leaning towards that.
Tom:
We can transcend this to a certain degree, but it’s still in our biology guys want to strive for status. They want to strive in order to get the woman. This is why guys get married because what happens? Their testosterone drops. Their testosterone drops because they no longer have to get more status. They have now gotten their woman that can settle down and then guess what happens again. When she gets, as soon as she gets pregnant, testosterone drops down, even farther. And other hormones start kicking into men to help them become compassionate with the kids. When they come, isn’t that fascinating. All happens automatically.
Maggie:
The chemical reactions of the body just automatic,
Tom:
Automatic, you don’t have even know she’s pregnant and it’s starting to happen. Because I think it’s smell. I think they’re going to find out that he can smell what’s happening. So there’s all kinds of things going on in our body, biologically that we don’t know about. There’s a great book on fatherhood. What’s the name of that book, Maggie? I forget. But it’s all about all the different things we’re finding. The science is finding about fathers and it’s incredible
Maggie:
If it doesn’t come to you now send it to me later. We’ll add it to the show notes because I know people want to check that out. Absolutely.
Tom:
Yeah. That would be a good book for people to read. Particularly parents. It’s fascinatin what happens for fathers. And of course, fathers are absolutely instrumental. We’ve got to have fathers. They know now that they’ve done, McClanahan has done research and she has found that fatherlessness is causative. It causes these problems like, you know, the school dropouts, all these like 20 or 30 different problems that are connected now to fatherlessness. And our number one problem in our country is a lack of fathers in the home. That’s it It’s as simple as that, you get called this back in the home. Everything else is going to improve.
Maggie:
Yeah. I grew up without a dad so I can relate to that. Yeah.
Tom:
Fathers teach compassion, Maggie, did you know that? Either that or mothers who were very strict. Because they know now that you know, we always thought it was mom who was the the one who’s going to teach compassion but no it’s the dad. Because what happens is the dad set limits. The kid says, I want ice cream daddy. The dad says no, not until you eat your broccoli. Nope. Broccoli first. And this goes on for five minutes. Right? So finally the child says, I give up dad’s right. I got to eat the broccoli. So they eat the broccoli, they get ice cream, right? What does that whole scenario do? They’ve broken it down. And they know this scenario creates a rudiment of compassion by giving the child a necessity that they have to see the world through someone else’s eyes. They have to act and see the world through the father’s eyes. He said, no, no ice cream to eat your broccoli. Right. And it’s that over and over again of setting limits and saying no, no, no. But yes, if you know, this teaches children how to see the world through other people’s eyes. And that’s the root of compassion. Fascinating. That’s another thing in that father’s book.
Maggie:
It is fascinating. And it’s like, we just have other people in those roles now. Right? We just have other people filling the role that father fill.
Tom:
Yes, and they can’t come close. Sometimes mothers can do somethings, but throwing the kids in the air, the fathers automatically thow their kids in the air, have you ever seen a dad do that?
Maggie:
I’ve seen dads do that, yeah.
Tom:
And what was the mom do? No don’t do that! We know now it’s that act of throwing kids in the air that helps children later in life with taking risks.
Maggie:
Fascinating.
Tom:
Yeah, I’ll stop there beause we got to get back to grief, but that’s, you know, the testosterone is an important piece. And the first thing it does is it pushes men to strive for status, but it does a whole lot more than that. It reduces fear and increases capacity to take risks.
Maggie:
This is the chemical reaction that the man has.
Tom:
As his testosterone goes up, his fear is going to diminish. His testosterone goes up, he’s going to be more likely to take risks. They’ve also found a component in testosterone that is stress reducing. So, and this is why they think men will do things over and over and over again, trying to get them right like Edison. You know, this is testosterone pushing him to do this. In fact, they’ve now found that you can graph a man’s testosterone with his creativity. Graph a man’s testosterone with his productivity. If you look at all the major composers, someone did some research on it. Then they looked at the major composers that they graphed his testosterone and his most important pieces were during that period when his testosterone was the highest.
Maggie:
How fascinating.
Tom:
There are all kinds of things we don’t know Maggie about testosterone, but the most important thing is it pushes men to strive. This is something men do naturally and women get so irritated. He’s always got to win, why does he always have to win? The other thing, Maggie, is it gives men what’s it called? What’s the word for it? It gives men the sense that they have to protect their status once it’s gained. So this push has been to protect their status. If they have status that they’ve gained and someone says you don’t have that status, they’re going to attack. Think of a bar. Think of being in a bar with men who are drinking, they’re already drinking. Their testosterone is fluttering around. And someone says to them, you don’t have that status. Oh yes I do. Oh no, I don’t. This is how bar fights get started. Especially if the IQ is too low because a higher IQ will say, Oh man, forget about it. Or someone who’s been who’s 28 or older, you know.
Maggie:
Right, the flood of all the hormones and all the things going on.
Tom:
We can see now, what causes these fight, it’s this testosterone, the strive for status, the capacity to want to protect that status once it’s gained, this just creates this, Oh, it’s a mess.
Maggie:
This is so fascinating. I think that part of this, what you’re talking about with the testosterone and the hierarchy and all of that, at least is something else that you mentioned in the book that I thought was really fascinating, which is how sometimes women reach out to men and they grade or evaluate the man’s reaction based on talking and openly emoting. And when the man doesn’t do that, it’s like he fails a test. It’s like you took the test and failed. And what that ends up doing, it pushes him away even more. And it leaves them feeling angry and misunderstood. And you mentioned how important it is for the man to be respected and admired.
Tom:
Yes.
Maggie:
I would love for you to speak to that because I see that in the women that I help is that when we’re able to increase appreciation, express, gratitude, increase the respect and admiration immediately. It’s like I always say that sex and gratitude are like glue that help that relationship get stronger. Tell us a little bit about that whole respected and admired part.
Tom:
I’m going to put my generalization hat on here. We’re going to generalize real big time. But in general women often are fueled by a sense that they’re cared for right. A sense that they’re accepted and cared for. And if a man can help a woman sense that she is cared for, she’s going to feel like ahh. But ladies, the same sense in him, he’s probably not in the cared for category but in the admiration and respect. Because if you think back to when you first met, you know, the first met when you were just completely in love, completely just together and you admired the hell out of him. He loved it and grew with that. And he made you feel like you were really cared for.
Tom:
So, think back to when you first got together, the things you did then are really keys to how you could now change things to make it a little bit better, you know, but especially the admiration, respect, cause that is fuel for the masculine. You admire him, he will open up like a book. I mean, what’s the easiest way to get a man, to tell you how you screwed things up? Admire him. I’m telling you, but don’t lie. Don’t say something you don’t believe is true. But if you say, you know I admire the way you mow the lawn. You know, the first thing that’s going to say is, well, I could have done it better this way or that way. He’s going to open. Once he knows he’s got the status, and you tell him he has the status, he’s free to open up and tell you all the rest of it.
Maggie+:
I love it so much. The way that I describe it with my clients as I call it the hero hypothesis. And it’s basically, I say, listen, your partner wants to be your hero. He may not have ever thought about it. Like it’s not a conscious thought that he’s had, but he wants to be your hero. And here’s what happens. I am a type A woman I’m very driven. I’m very focused and all that. And many of my clients are in a similar way. And sometimes we are very independent. We’re like, we don’t need a hero.
Tom:
Right. Right.
Maggie:
We deprive him of the opportunity to be the hero, to say, give them opportunities even if it’s picking up milk on the way home, give them the opportunity to be the hero in the situation. And I sort of tested a case study style right, with my clients. And it’s like, well, yeah, whenever we give them more and more opportunities to be the hero, the closer and closer and closer we get. And this just goes so well with everything that you’re describing.
Tom:
Yeah. And the admiration is an easy way to make him a hero. You know, boys are taught to be heroes. There’s little girls are learning social cues and social, social ways of being with each other, playing with doll babies, the boys are learning how to be heroes. They’re learning how to succeed, to get out there. He doesn’t dream of getting married. He dreams of being an astronaut or being a football hero, or he is dreaming of being a hero. That’s what he’s thinking about. That’s what he’s loving. And so, you know, he’s never going to be the hero. And he gives up on that pretty much. I mean, he wants to be a hero. Doesn’t literally think he’s going to be a hero, but he still will respond to admiration. I really admire the way you did XYZ.
Maggie:
I was going to say. I love that you said only say it if it’s true and the way that I say it is find the place in your heart where it’s true. The thing that is true. Find that thing. So if you don’t love how he mowed the lawn, don’t say it. Say I love how you make the coffee or I love how you did this other thing. Right? Like find the thing that is true and focus and cultivate and harness and build on that.
Tom:
If you do admire him. But don’t BS him because he will pick it up in a second.
Maggie:
And here’s something, Oh my gosh Tom. I talk about this all the time and we must talk about it because you said it now. Many people that I have spoken to especially recently have said, well, I didn’t say anything to my husband so he doesn’t know that I feel this way. Every single person has walked into a house where it feels warm and delicious and cozy, you just want to like sit and like have some cookies and like have a good time. It doesn’t even have to be a pretty house. You just walk in there and it just feels like so delicious. You walk into a beautiful, super designed, amazing maybe aesthetically isn’t the prettiest thing. And you feel how cold it is and you can’t get out fast enough. I’m like have any words been spoken in these two scenarios? Zero words have been spoken. So if yoiu’re thinking, Oh my husband doesn’t know because they never said with so much love, he knows.
Tom:
Yes. We need to learn how to spiral up. Admiration is one of the ways you could light a match to that. Positive energy works the same way as negative. If we admire something in someone it’s going to come right back to us and you start to build up a positive spin that keeps going and going until you spiral up. And I’ve seen relationships, Maggie, where people want the best for each other and they want to make each other happy and they’ll go out of their way to do that. And the relationship just spirals up and up and up. That’s what we want.
Maggie:
I love that spiral up, everyone. That’s what they’re all about here. Okay. Let’s talk about spiraling up and loving. You mentioned in the book when your partner, in this case, since it is a marriage podcast, your partner, has a dark mood or irritability or is going through something. And you say what I say in like every episode is about this in some way, shape or form, which is listen and love. Just listen and love. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Tom:
Oh, if you can do those two things you’ve succeeded. There’s no question that those two things will take you, wonderful places. But most of us get stuck with one thing or another that keeps us from being able to do that. Most of us, you know, have grown up in houses and families where we’re not really taught to do that. No, we didn’t get taught that. And so we have to relearn it. We have to learn it in a new way and the way you learn it is practice, practice, practice. But listening and loving is just the bottom. So one way to think about yourself is, okay, where do I fall short with listening and loving? How can I, you know, the Buddhists have this thing? Oh, if I can remember it now they have a thing where they say, there’s three things you need to check on before you say one word. Is it truthful? Is it kind? And is it, I forgot the last one. I’ve heard it as well. And I’ll think of it before we finish.
Maggie:
Let’s see. Here it is. If you propose to speak, always ask yourself, is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
Tom:
There you go. Necessary is one way to say it. That’s good. Helpful was the one.
Maggie:
Helpful. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Tom:
That’s hard to do. But before you say one word think, does what I’m going to say go along with those three things? If it does fire it up.
Maggie:
So what I say, because this is obviously what I talk about is having a five star marriage, like having a marriage that thrives, not just survives, not just, you’re going to be mediocre motel, you want a thriving, five star one. Then it’s like, what would love do now? If I was loving and this person’s going through whatever they’re going through, I may not agree with what they’re doing, but if I was loving in this moment, how would I approach it? That’s it. It’s one of those things. That’s very simple, but simple doesn’t make it easy.
Tom:
One of the toughest things you’ll ever do. First off is meditation, but that’s the second.
Maggie:
I have loved everything you’ve shared today. Thank you so much for sharing your perspectives, for sharing your experience, for sharing your deep thoughts on how we can have a better understanding for how men heal. Is there anything you wanted to add before we wrap up today?
Tom:
You know, we didn’t talk much about the different ways that men will do this. I’m sorry we didn’t talk about that. But also what women can do to help men who are grieving. Let me give you one example. There’s a guy whose father and he loved baseball. Right? And then the local baseball team was there. That’s what they did. Right. And so the father died. And so the wife, what she did was she said to him, honey, I want to take you to a baseball game in honor of your father and that melted him. Because what did she do? She moved into where he was, where he lived. That’s his story. She moved into action. They do something together. When they went to that game, they could sit and he’d probably say something about his dad. He might not. And that would be okay too. She was honoring his actions. She was honoring his way of doing things. I’m telling you, he loved her for it.
Maggie:
I love that so much. So, The Way Men Heal, one of the things I love about the book is also that it’s very short. It’s 58 pages.
Tom:
Yeah. It’s a little teeny guy.
Maggie:
I read it in one afternoon. And I encourage everyone. If you’ve been moved by our conversation today, if it’s helped you see something you didn’t see before, definitely get the book. It’s, it’s just a great reminder. And it goes deeper into some of the examples that Tom gave. It’s just so, so good. Thank you so, so much for being here. I like to wrap up episodes with a question from The Questions For Couples Journal, let’s find a fun one. Let’s see, I happen to go to the same page on a different episode, but let’s see what your answer is. When you were a child, what would make you jump out of bed? Excited for the day?
Tom:
Everything. Literally. I was always the first up at my house and drove my parents crazy because I would be up and doing this or doing that. And I didn’t sleep that much. I was just ready for the day. Every, every morning I was ready.
Maggie:
Yeah. And it sounds like you’re that way now, too.
Tom:
Yes, exactly. Exactly. I slept nine hours last night. I couldn’t believe it. I want to say, are you okay? I usually sleep like six or seven? So yeah. It’s unusual for me to sleep a lot, but got down right out of bed. Boom.
Maggie:
Everything. Yes. I love it. What is the best way for people to connect with you, Tom?
Tom:
Oh, Tgolden.com is one way they can find out about my speaking and books or whatever. But if they want to know about men’s stuff, they could go to either regardingmen.com or menaregood.com.
Maggie:
Regardingmen.com or Menaregood.com and Tgolden.com just has everything. And we’ll put all those links in the show notes. So if you’re listening to this, we’ll make sure people can find you after this.
Tom:
My Twitter is @trgolden. So come see me there too
Maggie:
Love it. Thanks again. Thank you so much, bye everyone.