Emotional Health

Welcome to another episode of gay men going deeper. This is a podcast series by the gay men’s brotherhood where we talk about personal development, mental health, and sexuality. Your host today are Matt Landsiedel, Calan Breckon and myself, Michael DiIorio. Collectively we have over 40 years of experience in the personal development world and if this is your first time listening to us, we want to welcome you to the show.

We each have our own coaching practice and in this podcast, we’re giving away all of our best stuff. So today we’re going to be talking about emotional health and we’ll be answering questions such as what does it mean to be emotionally healthy? How can you tell when your emotional health may be suffering? How do you handle challenging emotions and what are some simple things you can do to support your emotional health?

So if you want to feel better, this is the episode for you. Okay. For a reminder out there, we will be continuing this discussion on Thursday, May 26th. When we’ll be hosting a zoom hangout, this is where we give you guys a chance to share your own thoughts on the topics we discuss here on the podcast. This month theme is mental health.

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your shame over 35 coaching videos, access to a members only Facebook group and monthly zoom calls. So if you’ve been waiting to go deeper with your personal development, we invite you to come in and join us. So head over to gay men, going deeper.com to register today. All right. And before we jump in, as we would like to do here on the podcast,

we want to read a review from one of our YouTube viewers. This comes from depending shoe, and I hope I’m saying your name, right? I apologize if I did not. And this was after the episode we did on suicide. And he says, I just can’t express my response and words. After watching this episode, all I would say is each of you has inspired me profoundly to embrace and speak out my vulnerabilities.

Thank you for the raw honesty and courage. So we want to thank you. Thanks you for your kind words and support. I love that. I also want to say before we jumped in that on June, we are doing a in person event in Toronto for pride season. And that event just went live. So you can find that on our page,

but it’s going to be in Riverdale park on June 18th from 6:00 PM, till 8:00 PM. We’re going to be on the east part of, of the park. So that’ll be me and Michael here in Toronto, we will be hanging out. So I just wanted to throw that out there to give people enough time to put it in their calendars. If you’re in Toronto.

Yes, please come join us. Come say hi. We’ll have a good turnout as we have in the past. Yeah. I’ll put the P I’ll put the, the event in the show notes of today’s show. Awesome. Cool. Okay. So without further ado, let’s jump into today’s topic of emotional health. So I want to talk a little bit about what,

what emotional health is the difference between that and mental health, and then an example to illustrate. Then we can jump into the discussion questions. So mental health is, or sorry, emotional health is considered part of mental health, but I think it deserves its own conversation specifically about emotions. And I’ll explain why, but first I think it’s important that I,

I want to share how I’d like to decipher between these two very interconnected terms, mental and emotional they’re often used very interchangeably, but let’s try to pick them apart just for today’s episode. Okay. For today, let’s think about mental health is how you think and emotional health is how you feel thoughts happen in the mind. And it’s the sentence in your brain.

For example, I love my mother. That is a thought that happens in my mind. Feelings on the other hand are felt within your body and a feeling is a feeling. So I feel the feeling of love and warmth expansion, whatever in my body. Now, of course you can think about your emotions and you can feel your, you can feel your feelings.

So it’s really important that you realize that these two things influenced each other, your thoughts influence your feelings and how you feel will influence how you think. But in the moment they all are. They’re often happening all at the same time. It’s really hard to decipher. So I want to try to pick it apart by using an example to illustrate. So let’s say,

hopefully this is relatable. Let’s say you’re going out on a date and you’ve met this guy on Tinder. You’ve been chatting. He’s super cute. You’ve got great chats and super cool. And you’re finally bit the bullet and said, okay, let’s meet in person. So it’s your first date. You’re going on the first day you look online, it’s got all your nice fancy clothes on,

and you’re sitting in this restaurant and you’re just waiting for him. Now you may be thinking thoughts like, oh my God, what if I don’t like him? Wait, well, what if he doesn’t like me? Why did I wear these shoes? My hair is so annoying today. Why is it like this? Oh my God. I showed up too early.

I’m such a loser. He’s way out of my league. He’s completely gonna go speak when he gets here. No, those are all thoughts. Those are all thoughts that happen in your brain. But if you’ll notice, you’re probably having a bit of an emotional to on your body, right? You’re probably having an emotional response. And so that’s happening in your body.

And that is the emotion. That is the feeling. And by the way, I use the word feeling and emotion interchangeably. So for me, as I was reading that out to you guys, I feel I still do feel, I felt anxiety. I felt nervous. I felt stressed. I felt worry. So those are all emotions. So again,

the thoughts are the sentences. The feelings are the feelings of my body. So where in my body is it. And for everyone, I might be a little bit different, but for me, I feel it in the pit of my stomach, as I was reading that, I was like, oh my God, this is terrible. It feels really heavy for me.

My heart’s beating faster and I’ve been getting like sweaty palms when I’m nervous. So that is an example of how, how you can differentiate between the two things. Now, of course in the moment they’re happening all at the same time, and you’re not differentiating between them. But just to show you as an example. And of course, if you’re a frequent listener of this podcast,

you know that we are very big on feelings and emotions here. We’ve done two episodes specifically on these topics. One was episode nine, how to cope with challenging emotions. And then the other one was episode 63, emotional intelligence. So I definitely recommend you go back and listen to those as well. And we are big on emotions for very good reason.

Your emotions are the reason you do or don’t do anything in your life that completely influenced your behavior, how you show up in the world. So if you ever question, why did I do that? Or why didn’t I do that? Why am I not doing that? Or why am I doing that? And if you answer that honestly, with self-awareness,

if you go down deep enough, you will end up at some kind of emotion. Either. You want to feel a positive emotion. So you’re doing something because you want to feel success. You want to feel love. You want to feel joy, belonging, happiness. So you’re taking these actions to try to feel that, or you don’t want to feel a negative emotion.

So you’re doing something or not doing something because you don’t want to feel lonely. You don’t want to feel pain or bored or shame, right? So it’s very important that we look into our emotional health. That is my pitch for why your emotions matter. Of course your, your thoughts matter as well. We talked about that a lot too, but today I want to focus specifically on those emotions.

So with that said, let’s turn it over to my lovely co-hosts here and open up the first question, which is, what does it mean to be emotionally healthy? When we talk about this, what are we talking about? Exactly. So let’s start with talent today. I knew it. I was like, I feel like it’s going to come to me today.

So for me, what does it mean to be emotionally healthy? For me, it means balance there’s balance in my life. There’s well adjusted. Like I’m well adjusted to what’s going on. I’m kind of ready for whatever comes my way for the most part. And that I feel supported. So, you know, it mostly comes down to this balance in my,

in my world. And like, am I balancing out everything? Or am I kind of like playing the distractor factor? Where things like social media on my scrolling too much on my phone, like that signifies to me that I’m not imbalanced because if I’m imbalanced and I don’t really need to look at my phone, I can enjoy, you know, the show I’m watching.

Now I can enjoy being with whoever I’m with. So when I’m emotionally healthy, I don’t feel the pole to get distracted by other things or to divert away from certain things. I can fully engage with life. I can fully engage with what’s going on, or I can fully engage with who I’m around and be settled in that and really enjoy that experience.

And when I’m not feeling emotionally healthy, that’s when all the other kind of stuff starts coming into play. And you know, we’re going to discuss those things a little bit later on, but yeah, it’s, it’s all about balance in my world. It’s not going too far one way or too far the other way. It’s how do they marry each other?

And I’ll talk a little bit more later on about how I personally figured that out and how I navigate that because I, I used to be a very thought person and I still am a very methodical, logical like minded person. Like that’s what I use. I use my brain to think through things. And I used to try and use my brain to think through my emotions and my feelings,

and I could understand them on a logical level, but getting into the feelings, getting into the actual feeling of it is very new to me and experiencing that and moving through that has been a new process. And Matt actually taught me a lot about that, which I am, again, going to talk about later on, on how I did that, which I’m sure we’re all going to jump into,

but for me, that’s what being, you know, emotionally healthy means. What about, what about you, Matt? Well, I want to give you guys some kudos because awesome job, Michael, on your intro, there was a lot of really good, valuable stuff there and Kalyn, once again, I relate to your share. There’s one thing I wanted to add.

I think, I think of the direction of the way that it goes between mental health and emotional health. And I think for the longest time I thought my emotional or my mental health was in control of my emotional health, but over the course of the last while I’ve actually learned, it’s the opposite. My emotional health is in charge of my mental health because it’s unprocessed emotions in my opinion,

that state trapped in our body. And that’s what our mental health feeds off of. And when we’re not feeling our emotions and we’re, we’re more repressed in our emotional nature, then I feel like our mental health becomes problematic. And that’s where you have things like psychosomatic disorders that I believe that the emotion is trapped in our body. And we start starts to manifest as disease and these sorts of things and,

and mental health disorders. So I’m very much come from the philosophy that trauma is usually the underpinning of mental health, which is a little bit controversial in, in like, you know, the body of psychiatry. But I am fully in support of, of the trauma informed model when it comes to treating mental health and, and emotion. But so I just wanted to preface with that because a lot of the things I’m going to be sharing are going to be rooted in that,

that body of work. So what does it mean to be emotionally healthy? I think the biggest thing that I can say is just feeling, that’s what it means to be emotionally healthy. And I think when we move through enough suffering because of our emotions, we learn that preference over emotion is what leads to suffering, right? Because when we say that this emotion is more preferable to this emotion,

then we don’t want to feel this emotion. So we shut it off and we become dissociated. We do all the things. So I think emotional health is about embracing the spectrum of emotions and looking at the duality of emotion and saying, okay, well I have pleasure on one side, I have pain on the other. How can I really embrace both?

Because they’re both going to be part of the human experience. So that’s, that’s the first tip that I had. The second one is being aware of, of emotions and them, the them being in your body for one. So like the sematic aspect of emotion, but then the cycle, psychological aspect of emotion is understanding the meaning of the emotion. Like why,

if emotion is energy and it’s coming through us. And the main point of it is to guide us and show us something needs to be addressed, then we need to have that awareness, right? So I think self-awareness is really, really contributed to emotional health because it allows us to be aware of what the messages behind the emotion, what it’s trying to communicate to us.

And then the one that I’m learning right now the most is how to take that emotion and understand it, the meaning of it, but then really get clear about what the need is. And then emotional health for me is saying, okay, I have this need, I’m feeling fear. That’s my emotion. I have this need for safety. And how can I find safety in this moment?

How do I need to communicate something? Do I need to expose a part of myself? Like, what is that, that, that the messages. So I think that the relationship with our emotions is really what leads to emotional health. That would be my, yeah. What about you, Michael? I totally agree. You guys will set so much there.

I guess what I want to add to that is what emotional, what it means. Sorry, what, it’s not, I think it’s really important that I, that I say we’re not talking about being happy all the time. It’s not fair to say that being emotionally healthy means you’re happy and positive all the time. That is not an emotionally healthy person.

So I just want to make it clear that that’s not what we’re talking about, because like, like we said, you know, the human experience is going to be positive and negative. It’s, it’s how you handle that. Your relationship with them as Matt said so nicely. So yeah, what I had here was awareness, which we talked about allowing all of it,

which we talked about, and one other thing would be owning, owning your emotions. So I’m thinking back to my life, you know, there was a time and I still do this. Sometimes it’s not, of course where I blame other people for how I feel. And that’s a sign of, I would say, maybe not being could emotional health because my feelings are mine and your feelings are yours.

And they’re valid. I’m not saying that they’re not valid, but owning, owning them as your own because only then can you do something with them only then can you process them Leland only then can you embody it and do all the things that we just talked about here? Viktor Frankl has a quote that I’ve, I’m sure I’ve used one of those podcasts a bunch of times,

but I love it. Something along the lines of between stimulus and response, there is a gap and within that capitalize or power to choose. So I would say the, the marker of being in good emotional health would be owning all of it. That it is yours. So instead of you made me feel this way, it’s I feel the way I feel,

regardless of what happened outside. Now, I may want to feel angry. I may feel angry and that’s okay. Nothing has gone wrong, but then only once you own it, can you then do something with it? All right. So great answers guys. Let’s go on to the next question, which is, how can you tell when your emotional health may be suffering?

So this, I put this in here for people who might be listening to this and they’re like, oh yeah. Okay. Emotional health is trying to come to terms with it. How does that person know if they need to work on their emotional health? So we’ll go with the same order. Cool. So for this, I can tell when my emotional health is suffering,

when I get very quick to anger or I get very snappy and snarky, like if that’s happening, I’m like, okay, something is very wrong here. And I’m not emotionally connected to myself, or I also will do the opposite and I’ll get very quiet and I’ll want to run away and hide and turn the world off. So it’s like, if I,

if I it’s the fight flight kind of going on. So it’s like either, you know, if it’s a situation where it’s like, I need to fight and I’m like quick to anger and that’s where I’m like, okay, things aren’t really quite sinking up here, or I do the opposite and I run away and like turning the world off. Like,

I don’t want to handle this. I can’t handle this. And that’s me saying, I don’t want to handle my emotions. I don’t want to look at my emotions. I don’t want to manage them. And so when that’s going on, I can then look at that and go, okay, well, what’s really going on here. And it takes,

you know, a person to want to understand what’s going on with them. And to be curious about what’s happening there. Because when I was younger, I used to just flat out, ignore it all. Like I packed it all down. My family’s divorced kind of emotionally ruined me for a little while. When I like to protect myself, I just kind of closed all the doors and closed up shop.

And I was like, Nope. And like, I remember I used to kind of wear it as a badge of honor that like, I didn’t cry for years, years between like, when my parents divorced kind of like a lot was going on there and till like I was 16 and kicked out of the house. Cause I remember that was like a breaking point,

especially in those like older teenage years, like the, you know, 13, 14, 15, 16, like there was like, it was all dry. I like, I was like, okay, whatever. Like things were very dulled. And then once a flood gate open, once I got kicked out and I was out of my friends and it just like, it came out,

it was just like a flood gate burst open. Like it couldn’t handle it anymore. And it was like on a reduction of emotion. So if that’s something that happens to you where you keep things kind of chilled and you’re like, no, everything’s fine. Everything is us. And you know, it’s not awesome. And you’re just kind of burying everything.

Basically what you’re doing is you are preparing for Mount Vesuvius to erupt someday because it will, and it’s going to happen in an uncontrolled way. And your going to probably regret some things because you’re not in control because you’re a make delays getting shut down or no, your prefrontal cortex is getting shut down and your Migdal is taken over and all rationality goes out the window.

And so that’s not a real healthy way to deal with these things. So now as I’m older and I’ve done this work and I learned, I continue to keep learning, I now process emotions and pains and, and things that I need to go through on micro dose levels so that I can manage it. So that can be like, cool. Like it might not be everything,

but it’s enough for me to kind of not hold tight onto this. And that’s going to come up later in the next question of how do you handle challenging emotions. But yeah, those are kind of the, the real noticeable ways that I know when I’m not really doing well and kind of struggling through, you know, balancing out my emotions. What about you,

Matt? Hmm. Yeah. I relate to a lot of what you shared. Like micro-dosing, I liked that term because it’s like allowing little bits through and you don’t become flooded. And I think when I think about like my, you know, how I can tell when my emotional health may be suffering, it’s similar to you, Colin, in the sense that there’s the polarities of responses to emotions when it comes to unhealthy emotion regulation,

which is under regulation, which would be anxiety overwhelm, we get overwhelmed and flooded by our emotions. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we have over-regulation, which is an avoidance strategy where we, we shut off and we repress we’d associate, we numb, we do those things and I’ve seen both in my experience and, and I’m learning now in my life,

how to come back to center and she used the word you use is balance having balance, really knowing that it’s okay to do both. It’s okay to get flooded. And it’s okay to over-regulate right. The key though is awareness of when we’re doing what, because when it’s all unconscious and we’re not aware of it, we are shut down to the world.

We’re shut down to our relationships. So when I, when I want to over-regulate and I want to eat my emotions, I’m like, okay, Matt has emotions. I can feel them. I’m choosing to go and eat, right? So it’s like, I’m, I’m very aware. So that’s, that’s the first point that I had. And then to answer the question more directly projecting you’re projecting my pain onto others is,

is one way that I know that my, my emotional health is suffering because I don’t want to take responsibility, right? The ego does not want to have anything to do with emotions, and it doesn’t want to have anything to do with being wrong. So it just projects, its pain into the world. And, and I see this so much on social media right now,

to the point where I’ve stopped scrolling and I’ve stopped allowing people to infiltrate me with, you know, because I’m very sensitive to that stuff. I consume constantly. I process information very deep. And what of how I’m experiencing social media right now is it’s just assessed pool of pain, being projected, shadows, being projected, unconsciousness, being projected. And I get that.

That’s how things need to play out in the human experience. I totally get it. And I’m not shaming that experience, but I’m just recognizing my own intolerance of it right now, because it’s just, it feels heavy. Do you know what I mean? Cause there’s a lot of it. So that’s a big thing. And you know, Eckert tool talks a lot about the pain body and,

and in my experience of the pain body, it’s, it is unprocessed emotion. It’s unprocessed memory, it’s unprocessed trauma. It lives inside of our body. And then what we do is we interact with the world through that pain body and we’re hurling pain and shame and hurt and all this stuff onto other people and hoping that it reconciles, but it never does.

Right. Unless until we become conscious of it. So, so that was the other one. The other one is disease in the body. I talked earlier about psychosomatics and how our psychology directly impacts our, our body, right. And I’m experienced, I’ve experienced that my whole life like tummy stuff in my emotions. But I think a lot of my trauma and unprocessed emotion that I stored in my body for pretty much a whole decade,

I didn’t feel for a whole decade. I was completely shut off and all those emotions had to go somewhere. Right. So I think they went into my spine because I’ve had a lot of spinal issues have had a ton of lower back issues. And now I’m having a ton of cervical spine issues. And as I do healing and I do release work or with trauma,

guess what starts to improve, right. My spinal health. So I’m like, oh, there’s gotta be a correlation here. And I, I hear this all the time. And there is lots of bodies of research that show, that show that, that correlation as well. But, and then I would say the other thing would be mental health disorders.

You know, addiction is a really big one, emotional health being masked by addiction. So, you know, I did addiction counseling work for 10 years and you know, always, never, never wants that. I’m worked with somebody where the underlying issue, wasn’t some form of emotional repression, whether that be trauma or, or whatnot. So yeah, those would be probably the top,

top three things projecting your pain onto others disease in the body and mental health disorders. That’s going to really show that your mental health or your emotional health is likely needing to be tended to. Yeah, those are all great examples. Thanks guys. I think for, for me personally, I’ll answer from that perspective for me personally, how I know would be when I’m not necessarily to the point of addiction,

but it could be over, over consuming anything. So numbing, we call that numbing. I thought that numbing. So when I don’t want to feel the underlying feeling, let’s call it shame, loneliness, pain, whatever it is. I don’t want to feel it. So what I do unconsciously or subconsciously almost is go for those hits of dopamine, which are kind of very false pleasure hits of something that feels good and an attempt.

Now I don’t realize I’m doing this consciously of course, in an attempt to feel better. So, oh, let me just, let me just watch another episode of just binge watch TV all weekend or overheat, or what I used to do is over drink or over overused substances over Instagramming, over social media and over Facebook and over porting over shopping, even overworking,

which sounds noble, but no, you can overdo it on anything over gaming, right? Things, things seem innocent, but they, they give you in their own ways, their hits of dopamine and the, you know, the unfortunate thing is there’s no shortage of things in the world or companies who want to make money from this. So they make it very easy for us to continue getting that hit of dopamine.

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t solve anything that might make you feel better in the moment. But once that hit goes off, you’re still left with that underlying emotion that Matt was talking about. So for me, that’s how I notice is if I’m kind of like, oh, wait a minute. I’ve been, I’ve been numbing for such a long time.

And if I don’t have that thing, if that thing gets taken away, for whatever reason, it’s almost like a panic like, oh no, no, no, no, no. Now I’m going to be left with feeling whatever I’m feeling loneliness for me, it was Grindr was my, was my antidote to loneliness. I was never lonely if I had my grinder close by.

But as soon as you took Grindr offline, oh boy, Michael didn’t Michael, wasn’t happy. So that’s how I kind of know or when, when I, when my emotional health needs tending to. So yeah, I think that those are all really good examples. You guys did a great job explaining that. I think also everyone’s emotional health, like mental health needs tending to,

it’s not a matter of like, okay, I’m great emotionally today. So I don’t need to worry about it. I think it’s important to realize that there’s always work to do or room to, to take care of it. Just like your physical health. You don’t just stop eating healthy or stopped drinking water or getting sleep. It’s always something that you want to work on Before we move on.

I do want to kind of stay two things that you guys talked about. Cause they’d gotten me really excited. Matt, you were talking about kind of like the extremes of like, you know, social media and people being pulled in. So, you know, such extreme degrees of things. And I think that the more you do this work, the more you kind of like tend to your mental health and tend to your emotional wellbeing,

that those extremes don’t affect you as much. And that you’re more willing to come to the middle of the table. Like we don’t get political in this, in this podcast, but I’m using this as an example because you know, people always talking about far left and far, right. But if you do the work on yourself, I find that those are the people who are more willing to kind of be in the middle and kind of are willing to see both sides.

They’re willing to experience like, okay, I know myself well enough to come to the table and sit with this other person who I might disagree with, but I value their opinion because they’re allowed to have their opinion. And I think that we can’t really do that unless we’ve done the work, which is why I think you’re seeing so many extremes in the world,

especially right now is because a lot of people have refused to do the work. And it’s coming to the boiling surface now where it’s like, okay, well either now you have to do the work or shit’s going to get crazy. So I wanted to mention that about kind of the extremes. And then Michael, when you were talking about like the Overwatch and the overdrinking the over this and that and the other,

I want to make sure that people know that they’re it, that if you’re doing it consciously and you’re doing it on purpose and you’re aware of it, that that’s okay. Cause like I’ve done it where I’ve sat on watch TV all day long, but that’s because I’ve done all my work for the week. And I’ve made that agreement with myself where I’m like,

I’m allowed to watch Netflix all day long because as long as it’s still making me happy and I don’t feel like, oh, something doesn’t feel good, then that’s okay. And same with over drinking. Like sometimes I’ve been drinking more lately because you know, Dodge wall’s back and we’re back in action. Everybody’s having fun, but there’s never been a time where I’ve felt like,

oh, that was too much. Even though I drank a lot, I was doing it because I was very much enjoying the situation I was in. I was having fun and it didn’t negatively affect me later. So I want to make sure that people know that there is an amount of discernment you have to use and that it comes down to the consciousness of which you’re doing the thing.

So yeah, I just wanted to throw those things out And, and your level might not be, my level might not be the other guy’s level. Right. It’s all different cyber saying here’s the appropriate amount. And then after this, you’re overdoing it. So the over part is really to your point, personal. And I think that’s the point of,

for the whole self-awareness piece that we talked about having that awareness to really be honest with yourself and say, okay, is this, am I soothing myself as a self soothing in a, in healthy, wonderful way or not? And I think, you know, having, having support and having help either from your friends, family, or even a professional can help you decipher where that line is.

Thank you. All right. Well, great segue into the next question, which is how do you handle challenging emotions? So, well, yeah, let’s get a little bit personal and know what you guys do to manage and process your challenging emotions. Matt, how about we start with you this time. I’m feeling called to build off of what calendar shared.

Cause now I’m all stimulated and I got a lot of good things, but I’ll share this one thing. So I always, I always tell my clients this. I said, every ball we’re all just activating or triggering each other into our higher evolutionary selves. Right? And I think the people who are the most vulnerable to triggers are the people who have unprocessed emotion and trauma in their body,

because that is what becomes activated when we get triggered, right? And the more we have in our body, the more we can become flooded by our emotions. So I just want to say for people like this has been my journey and I was triggered a shit ton by people constantly because it was playing off of all this unprocessed stuff. As I started to do this work,

I had to meet all of this unprocessed emotions. It was very heavy at first because what happens is when you start plugging your emotional self back online, you get really flooded and all these emotions come through and you’re, you’re easily activated. Then in my, my opinion, this is what’s happening on the planet right now. I think everybody is just activating each other.

So we can all have emotional purging and plug ourselves back into our emotional beings, which is the spiritual experience, right? Being plugged back into your emotional self and realizing that you’re more than just your personality, that there’s a divine nature. That’s underlying everything that’s playing out in our lives. So I wanted, I wanted to bring voice to that because I wanted it to instill hope in people.

If you’re calm, if you’re, if there’s so much emotion going on, it means you’re heading in the right direction. Nine times out of 10, there’s going to obviously be the asterix beside that when it comes to mental health that perhaps needs medication or whatnot. But I think if you’re feeling your healing, so how do you handle challenging emotions? Well,

geez, like with all the things, I have lots of tools in my toolbox. Some of them are unhealthy and some of them are healthy. And what I’ve learned is to not shame any of it, right, is to, if I need to take a break from myself, I’m going to take a break from myself and I’m going to do that in whatever way that I can muster up in that moment.

If I can’t muster up the oomph to sit with my emotions, then I’m going to go and eat and scroll Facebook until I have the courage to be able to sit with myself. Right. So I want to really bring voice to that. You know, if you’re unhealthy emotion regulating, and you’re aware of it, it’s like Calvin said, like, there’s no point in shaming yourself,

but try your best to come back to stillness and, and be with the emotions at some point when it feels like you can. And then, so a couple of the things that have really helped me along the way is to first slow down. And you know, you talk, Michael, it’s funny, you talk about all these things like overdoing things.

And what I was doing is because I’m obsessed with personal development and spirituality is I was over personal developing, right? Like I wasn’t sitting with my emotions. I was like, I was intellectualizing everything. And I was going down all these rabbit holes of trying to, you know, and I, it was, it became an obsession of mine. So really just slow down and,

and breathe and connect into the body. Because if we’re talking about emotional health, we’re talking about with the body, right. We really need to be with the body we need. And the body works at a very, very different pace than the mind. And for a lot of people, we live in a world where it’s so instantly gratified, we’re all sped up because of technology and accessing stillness is probably one of the hardest things for most people.

But it is, it is the doorway to liberation. I will say that at least in my experience of husband, so breathe, slow down, move towards the emotion because oftentimes again, we have, our ego has this, this thing where it’s like preference, like, oh, I don’t want to feel sadness. I want to feel happiness. And if sadness enters my experience,

I’m going to push it away. And I’m going to do everything in my power to move towards happiness, which in the moment it might feel like Facebook or food or these things, but they’re just, it’s, that’s not happiness, right? That’s just distraction from sadness. It’s like the positive or the negative way of framing it. But so move towards the emotion in the body.

You start to describe it. If you don’t, if you don’t, if emotional talent intelligence doesn’t come easy to you, that’s, it’s pretty normal. Right? So start to describe the sensation. Like I have a hot in my face, you know, I’ve got butterflies, I have tension in my shoulders. Just really start to develop a relationship with the emotion,

which is what I mean by move towards the emotion, start to develop a relationship with it. And that might be talking to the emotion that might be being with it in your body, whatever that looks like for you. And then one thing that’s really important in this journey is reach out for support, right? Like we talked about in the last episode on suicide is like how a lot of us carry shame around emotions and we view them as weakness.

So we keep them harbored inside of us and we don’t share them. But the other, you know, as we know, we’re social creatures and we’re meant to move through this experience together. And you know what, in my experience, you know, just calling up a friend and having somebody to listen to me and feel like connected to, in that emotion,

that usually helps it discharge. And the good thing about externalizing, the emotion with somebody is they can usually help you identify the unmet need easier if you’re not quite sure what that is for yourself. If you have a good friend that can really reflect objectivity back to no, I find that can be really helpful. So yeah, I’ll leave it there. I love that.

I’m the same. I like a good friend, just like a good heart to heart where it’s just like, am I going crazy? Like, because, and they can just be like, Nope, everybody feels like that sometimes. So those are all great. Thanks for those Matt for myself, I’m going to start off with therapy. One of the biggest ones,

that’s challenging emotions, just because, you know, working through emotions and feelings, wasn’t necessarily easy to me. And it’s still unpacking, still learning about that process, but they’re be talking about it kind of started the understanding process and then further moved me into getting into the body and the feeling. And it was the one session with my therapist was like the big connector between the two,

which I was just like, oh my God. And I had this big aha. And it was crazy. And in saying that, like trying to get into the body, cause I never used to get into my body. Like it was never very athletic growing up, but you know, I don’t love, you know, getting in a good sweat and like raw like that.

Isn’t my fives. But like I really enjoy DOT’s about because I love the fun play aspect of it. So I try and do things that remind me of fun and play and, and those enjoyments. And then the one that I was talking about earlier was the primal screaming that Matt taught me about. And so, cause I used to, I used to like lock down my emotions and I’m very good at it.

My brain is very good at tricking me into it. And so as I got older, once the flood gates opened up about the crying, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at being okay with crying and like not hiding it. And so if I’m watching something that’s sad, I let myself cry. You know, if you can’t do it around people at least let yourself do it by yourself.

Like watch that sad movie, let yourself feel the feelings because your mind doesn’t need to understand why your body just needs to go through it. That’s it. You don’t need to understand why just let your body go through it. With the primal screaming. I used to like bottled all my rage up. And I had a, had a lot from my childhood and I used to be like,

no, I’m just a happy person. But then like secretly, there was like this underlying rage that felt like a volcano that needed to explode. And so when Matt taught me about primal screaming, I’ve started implementing that little by little when like my roommate’s not around. And I’m feeling like something is really triggered me or I’m really upset or frustrated about a certain thing.

And I like just, you know, that, that point when you just need to scream it out and most people are like, well, that’s not the polite thing to do. That’s not the socially acceptable thing to do. And so I do with that into a pillow or a blanket or whatever so that, so my neighbors don’t think something’s been happening,

but I just let it rip. And I raged to the point where like neck is like bulging and my eyes are almost popping out of my head and I keep doing it until I really feel like an energy has dissipated because that’s how you are physically getting into your body and physically alleviating that emotion, that feeling inside of yourself. And once I do that,

that allows me to think a lot clearer about the situation. Or even if like there’s still like a trigger about the situation. At least the major frustration and anger has dissipated from it. And I can kind of like breathe and look at it a little bit more objectively and I can remove myself a bit and go, okay, still pissed off, still upset,

but let’s look at this a little bit more objectively and see what’s going on here. So that has been a huge help in, in allowing me to process emotions that I maybe can’t quite logically understand or process or even things from my childhood that I don’t know are there, but I just need to get this out of my body has been a huge help.

And then another one is like yoga and meditation are really big. And this is where I had my aha moment with my therapist is like, I was talking about all of this, like methodical, like logical side of emotions and feelings. And then I can’t remember what she said, but she’s like, well, get into your body. And Matt talked about this all the time on the podcast.

And I was like, yeah, I get it. Get into your body. But it wasn’t until she actually said, no, no, no, like stand up whenever you’re like not feeling safe because I had a lot of body stuff going on in my body. Like, you know, I talked about my digestion and issues I’ve had in my body where I don’t feel safe inside of myself.

I am like in constant pain all the time. And so, because I don’t feel safe with inside of myself, I’ve created this experience in my world. And the only way I can start healing that is by feeling safe in my body. And so she was like, well, when you have those moments where you don’t feel safe in your body, stand up and do like a very strong yoga pose that makes you feel safe and confident and secure.

And I was like, what? And she’s like, that is what getting into your body is that is moving from your mind into your body so that you can physically feel the safety inside of yourself and that you can, your body can tell your mind, oh, I am safe in this moment. I am safe here. And that was like a huge brain aha moment of like holy crap.

And so I’ve started implementing that into my world of like, okay, I need to reteach my body, my physical body, that I’m safe inside of myself. And I can’t do that from the brain up. Like Matt said, it’s from, it’s from the feelings up where we think it’s the top down, but it’s kind of the bottom up. And so yoga and meditation has really helped.

And I’ve, I used to meditate I’ve meditated for years, but recently I’ve really been dedicated to meditating at least 12 minutes a night before I go to bed. It’s part of London, Mike decompression. And I just put on like, whatever, YouTube, meditation, music, like no walkthrough or whatever, just like sound. And I just let myself keep coming back to like my breathing and myself for 12 minutes.

And it has really helped me kind of just like calm things and relax into my body. And then that’s where I can check in with my body. Like, do I have pain today? Where do I have pain? What’s going on there? Like what’s happening and, and kind of do those check-ins. And so those are my big things around how I handle the emotions because I never used to understand how to,

and now I’m not great at it. I’m not perfect at it, but at least I’m moving through them better than I ever have before. I want to just say one thing before Michael jumps in, I love, well, first of all, your self-awareness is outstanding. I relate to what you’re sharing because I think what you’re describing is dissociation leaving the body.

And I want to say to people, chronic pain is a very big reason why people dissociate. It’s not just emotional pain. So if we have chronic pain and we don’t want to be in our body, we leave our body. We create this reality away from the pain. And then we’re also disconnected from our emotions. So yeah, A hundred percent.

And if you listen to last week’s episode about depression that I did with Jacob, we talked about this association in the gay community because there’s a lot of finding, sorry, we’re going down a rabbit hole guys. There’s a lot of findings that he’s had in his practice where a lot of gay men don’t remember a lot of their childhood because you disassociate from yourself.

Cause he, what was the question? He placed it. He was like, how can we create memories when we’re not connected to ourselves? And how can we create that with inside of ourselves? And we disassociated as children because we can’t connect to our true selves. So then we create less memories because we’re not actually connected with ourselves. And it was very fascinating about how,

you know, the gay community and the LGBTQ community has a more disassociated experience than the regular, everyday heterosexual person who kind of like has the normal quote unquote normal experience. So yeah, if you want, if you want to get more in that, go back to last week’s episode about depression and you can listen to that. Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up.

Math is very on point. Yeah. We’re giving these guys so much homework, all these episodes to go back to, but there was a very good reason for it, right? Like this is really important stuff. And at least for me, there’s, there’s no such thing as too much. Okay. So I have so many places I want to go with this cause now listening to Kalyn,

it inspired a whole other train of thought that I want to, how I want to answer this. So yes. To all of it, before I, before I answer what I was was what I was going to say initially, when it comes to releasing it within the body, which is completely accurate because emotion, like we talked about is stored in the body.

Right. So I was, I was thinking about primal screaming. I’m like, if I just primal scream every time I felt the negative emotion, they probably lock me away. So I was thinking, how do I do it? I, I, I, I, I mean, the way that I would do it is in the way that helps me is actually the opposite of what you were saying,

which is yes, going to the gym. Actually it does help me and releasing it or for me more likely to biking. Like if I’m biking in pedaling, like it just, if it’s anger or stress or something that really gets it out of me and then I’m exhausted and then I’ll just come home and I’ll just feel overwhelmed, just kind of feels a little bit better.

So definitely for me, that works another one that I love and maybe it’s a bit more fun is just dancing. So if I’m in a bad mood and I don’t want to be in a bad mood, so I’ve kind of, I’ve kind of processed stuff as part of my processing and I’ll say, okay, I want to just shake this off. Literally helped me put on the song,

shake it off by Taylor swift, as I’ll put on a song. And I’ll just like dance and I’ll sing. And maybe, you know what, actually, maybe the singing is actually my version of primal screaming. I’m not a good singer. And I think as I sing it out that actually does release the energy and I’ll just kinda dance it out.

So that’s something that just came to me now, as you guys were speaking, so thank you for inspiring that within me. Okay. So how I was going to answer this was sort of the three, I, going back to the example of the guy waiting for the date, the example I used in the beginning. So what I would, how I like to,

to think of emotions as there’s three things. I mean, there’s a million things we can do with them, but at the end of the day, they kind of fall into three categories. As I see it, the first thing is resistant. So ignore it, push away, hide from it just don’t want to deal with it. Whatever. The second thing is numbing it.

So feeling it, but then trying to solve it with dopamine or external things. So solving it with these things that aren’t actually going to solve it, we both talked about, or we’ve all talked about how those don’t really work. So you’re left with one option, feeling it feelings are meant to be felt. That’s why they’re feelings. So we call that allowing it,

we call that processing it and all the things. So just reminder when we resist it, they get stuck. They get bigger, they get overwhelming. They don’t go away when we numb them again, we don’t actually get rid of it. Just temporarily feels better, but it doesn’t go away. So allowing really is your only option. And when we talk about processing emotions,

I know it’s fairly coachy words. I want to talk about what that means to me. So when I say I process emotions, and by the way, I don’t always do this, but if I, I want to try my best to process my emotions in the moment when I’m feeling them. And the way I like to think about an emotion is there’s a beginning,

a middle and an end. And that helps me knowing that, oh, there’s oh, here it comes. Oh, here, I’m in it. I’m in it. I’m in it. I’m in it. And then kind of, it goes away knowing that there’s that pattern or that path helps me. So what I’d like to do is identify it.

That’s where that self-awareness comes in and I’m not talking about, I feel good. I feel bad. I feel mad. I feel sad, which unfortunately, for a lot of people is like the extent of their emotional awareness. Go back to listen to episode 63, but go beyond good, bad, mad, sad. What is the feeling? So,

you know, going back to the example of the date, anxious, worried, stressed, really tried to name it and identify it. Then I say, okay, cool. I am feeling anxiety. This is what anxiety feels like. So for me, this is how, you know, Matt was talking about, you know, develop a relationship with that emotion.

That’s how I do it. Name it. Okay. High anxiety. Here you are. Yep. This is it. And where do I feel aware of things I had to showing up for me today that is showing up for me in my stomach. And I’m notice how I’m talking about a very curious, very, not fun, but very openly, not like,

ah, I’m feeling anxious, like panic. It’s very, oh, okay. Here it is. Welcome. You know, welcome and anxiety. Welcome to the table. Thank you for joining me on my date today. And I kind of just talk to it like that. Knowing again, that there’s a beginning, a middle and an end, just like someone comes over to your house for,

for dinner. They come in, they stay, they leave. I think of emotions the same way. Come in, stay and then leave versus like trying to like, hold the door closed. Like no, no, no, you can’t come in. I’d rather just let them stay for about then take off whenever that. So other things I might do in the moment I’m trying to,

I can think of myself, primal screaming in a restaurant, waiting for a date and all the other people that’d be like, whoa, dude, just chill. So what am I doing in that case where I’m in public is I might just breathe. I’ll take a few breaths. I always do that. We always do that before this podcast, even just to settle our nerves that we get just a few breaths really helps me get in tune with my body.

Kind of goes to that meditation that Calvin was talking about. You don’t need to like it. You know, you don’t need to like the emotions. I don’t think any of us here are advocating for like loving feeling, shame or anger, but just, you don’t need to like it. You just need to feel it. And something else I might say to myself is this isn’t going to kill me.

One of my biggest emotional, my most challenging emotions for me is fear or like humiliation or some kind of shame. And I always will tell myself, this will not kill me like this, this too shall pass. Right. This is the saying, it’s just a feeling in my body. It’s just a feeling in my body. And yet we do so many things.

I think we do more harm avoiding than just feeling it, but we could do so much harm with like addiction and other ways, instead of just feeling what that very, yes, it’s a terrible feeling, what that might feel like. And then what I’ve added as well to this is I can take care of myself through this or I can get the help I need.

I know what to do. I know who to talk to. I can, I can get the support I need. So that’s a bit of that self, self soothing. So yeah, that’s sort of my, how I would process the negative emotion. That’s how I would go through it. And then yes, of course, if possible, when possible all the suggestions about like releasing it in your body are very helpful.

So thanks guys. I want to add to that as well. Cause when you were sitting, when you were talking about this, sitting at the, you couldn’t do the primal screaming in the, in the space, which yes, but one of the things that I forgot to mention is month’s muscle tensing and like clenching and muscle tensing. Because when you,

that’s another way to get into your body. And that’s another way that when I do primal scream, I also will do that interchangeably as well as like I’ll tense all the muscles in my body. It’s the same as going to the gym. Like you’re tensing muscles specifically, but I tend to all the muscles and then I release. And after the scream,

I allow myself to settle in and then breathe. So it’s a mix of that. And going through a couple of those cycles, it physically allows your body to process and move through it as well. So you could do tensing in the restaurant, like tense and like, just like all of the muscles and then just like, okay, breathe because you’re releasing that anger or that upset or frustration or fear or whatever it is.

And you’re sending it somewhere as opposed to just letting it linger and hide in your body. Yeah. A hundred percent. Thank you. Thank you for that. I’ll try that one next time. I haven’t done that one yet. Okay. So guys, we’re almost at the end, let’s, let’s leave our listeners, viewers with some helpful tips. So the last question here is what are some simple things that you can do to support your emotional health?

And Matt, we’ll start with you. I got lots of things. Okay. I’ll start with a three-step process that I use that helps me talk to my emotions because for me, like I am more on the intellectual spectrum and I like to, I’ve had to really learn how to bring myself down. One of the ways I’ve done that is learning how to talk to my,

to my emotions. So I, I wrote it down here. So the first thing I’ll say is I welcome. And then I insert the emotion. I welcome disappointment. That’s one. That’s really hard for me. I welcome disappointment to be part of my experience now. Right. And that’s just a mantra that I use so that it’s like, I’m opening myself up to,

to stillness and I’m going to, I’m choosing to be with it. If you don’t know how to be with the, if you don’t know what the emotion is, you can’t label it again. Just describe the sensation. I welcome this sensation to be part of my experience. Now, step two is a disappointment. I honor and respect your power because emotions are powerful,

right? And if we, we, most of us have been disrespecting our emotions for a long time and they want to be respected. They want to be heard, which is why they’re so loud and why they want to, they come in with so much, you know, fierce and, and power. So as soon as we honor that, that power we’re holding space for the emotion we’re saying,

okay, cool, come on in. Let’s let’s figure out what’s going on here. And then the last one is disappointment. I know you are here to teach me something. Please reveal that to me now. And that will be revealed to you in stillness, right? So you have to be with the emotion you have to find, oh, what is going on through you?

So, you know, if you are somebody that resorts to busy-ness busy-ness, in my opinion is a trauma response, right? The busier, we probably the more unresolved shit we have going on inside of us. So slow down and listen. And your body’s always trying to communicate something to you. So that’s kinda my three-step process for learning to talk to emotions,

allowing welcoming it’s all within that same framework, be mindful of suppression. So again, like we, we keep reiterating this, but it’s just so important if you’re going to suppress, just be mindful that you’re doing it right? Because that, that awareness is just so potent for transformation. Just even knowing that you’re doing it will help you change the behavior.

Just the awareness alone. One thing I wanted to note too, that, because we haven’t really brought voice to this, and I think it’s important and Callan’s share, made me realize this, but anger is a secondary emotion. It’s not a primary emotion. So we, we experience anger when we don’t feel comfortable experiencing the layers beneath it, right? Which for most people,

it’s sadness, grief, disappointment, frustration, these sorts of emotions. And that’s, that’s the emotion that needs to actually be accessed in order for it to release. So what, what anger does when we’re not willing to be with all the other emotions that creates rumination, right? So we stay stuck in the hamster wheel of the mind and we try and chew out the emotion that way,

and it doesn’t release. Right? And then we, we stay in this energy and we get all pent up. So something like a primal scream. It’s so perfect for that, because what it does is it, it discharges the top layer, which is the anger. And then it allows us to access the layers beneath it. And I find for men,

this is so powerful because men are the, the, the, the emotion that we tend to use to not be with ourselves is anger, right? Is we, we just project anger around and then that, you know, and the discharge of anger can definitely feel like a release, but you’re, if you’re not accessing the sadness or the grief, or whatever’s beneath it,

the healing doesn’t occur, the discharge might occur, but the healing won’t occur. So I wanted to bring voice to that. And then usually rumination means that yes, anger needs to be discharged, but it also means if, if it’s still not releasing, it means you need to come move into connection. So if you had a relational conflict, rumination usually tells me that something needs to be communicated,

right. I need to tell somebody that they broke my boundary, that they there’s a need that’s going on, but they need to be aware of, so move into connection, move into communication. When, when you can’t discharge the emotion, because obviously you need to access the unmet need. That’s feeding the emotion and then usually the emotional subside. So yeah,

that’s what I got. What about y’all? I love those. I love it. Love it. This is a great conversation today. Just throwing that out there. I know we’re tooting our own horn, but like damn today was good. So simple things while I already talked about meditation, which is, you know, become really important again in my life.

And I started, Michael will love this. I wouldn’t say journaling, but I’ve started doing her gratitude journal, like at the end of the day. And so I have my routine at the end of the day, I have my shower. I come to my room. I do like between one and five pushups, because I’m all about 1% of the time.

It’s not a lot, but at the end of the year, I would have done way more pushups than I would have if I hadn’t. And then from there, I, I do my meditation or I do my gratitude journal and I only write five things out. And that’s it just grateful for these five things. And then I go into my 12 minute meditation and then as part of that,

meditation is belly breathing. So like, don’t breathe, like not breathing into the chest, but really doing the Buddha belly breathing and like really focused on bringing that like air into your belly. And then I hold it for four seconds and then I release it. And then I kind of do that. And that’s the process of like calming your nervous system and calming yourself.

Cause the holding of the breath and then the releasing, it tells your body like I am safe. I am okay. Like I I’m safe enough to be able to do this kind of breathing. So that kind of really helps connect those things. And then another thing is like kind of like a physical thing you can do is cut down on caffeine. Cause I find that I’m a very sensitive person to caffeine and I know a lot of people are very addicted to caffeine,

which is great. And you can be in coffees. Like I love the flavor, I love all of it, but I’m also conscious and aware of the fact that it does physically affect me. And it gives me like I get feelings of anxiety and anxiousness and, and it creates rumination. And, and these thoughts in my head that wouldn’t have been there.

Had I not had the caffeine and every time I have it like clockwork, I’m like, why do I feel so anxious? Why don’t we feel like something’s missing or something’s wrong or something’s off. And it’s because I’ve engaged in coffee in a way that I wasn’t able to dissipate that energy, like by going on a walk or like something that got me physical and out,

and it just kind of sat in me. And then as I’m sitting, it’s, it’s built up in my body. So maybe cutting down a little bit on caffeine might be something that you can look into. And my last one is making time for yourself to enjoy play throughout the week. I think it’s really, really important. And a lot of adults don’t do it.

They think that they don’t have time. It’s not about having time. It’s about making time and Bernay brown. The research is there. It is a significant indicator and insanely important to have play implemented into your life. And so for me, that’s dodgeball on Mondays. There is no purpose to it. There’s no point. I mean, sure. They keep score and like people win and whatever,

but that’s not what it is for me. I literally go just so I can run around and have fun and get a little bit sweaty and squeal like a little school girl. Every time I get hit by a Dodge ball like that, that’s it. And like implementing some sort of play, whatever that is for you, whether it’s painting or artistic or singing or whatever that is really implementing that into your life is going to huge leaps and bounds for your emotional health and your emotional wellbeing.

So those are those mappings. Those are awesome guys. All of them are fantastic. I think the viewer listeners are going to get a lot of value out of this. And I agree it is a great conversation, which is why we keep talking about our emotional health and emotional intelligence. Okay. So I’ll add a couple. You guys had some really good ones.

What I would say is challenge the belief that everyone is happier than you, or more successful than you, or further along than you. This comes a lot from social media. And I hear this time and time again when I can, when I ask someone, well, why, why would you feel that you’re behind? Why, why do you feel like you should be over here?

And they’ll say, oh, well, you know, it’s phones. So I see, I see the posts from there and this happy relationship or, or they have this and they have that. And I’m like, okay, no, no, no, no, no. So everyone, everyone who is a human being deals with challenging emotions, a lot of the time,

you’re not going to always see it on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. So I think that’s the first thing is challenged. This belief that you have to be somewhere you’re not. And just be where you are. You know, everyone on Instagram is happy all the time. Therefore I should be to is essentially the, the, the theme I get. I don’t know if this just gay men or in general,

but that doesn’t help anyone. Certainly doesn’t help you. Everyone deals with it. So that’s one, right? Yeah. The other one I had is layering, which not talked about. So an example that I, that I have for layering is, you know, you feel bad about something in your life. So then you, you overeat and then you get mad at yourself for overeating,

and then you feel shame for overeating. So you’re adding all these layers of emotion on top. When really, if you had just dealt with the initial one there, but whatever you feel bad about, maybe you wouldn’t have overeaten. And then maybe you want me to feel shame about it, but just kind of, you can, if you want stop at that first layer,

and if you choose to continue going with it, then again to subconsciously, like we talked about, and then this one’s a bit of a, well, this one’s a bit of a school of hard knocks one, but it’s only because it came up recently with my niece. I have a 13 year old niece, as you can probably imagine her life is full of all kinds of negative emotions that she has no idea how to deal with.

So what I told her, it was, you know, the situations in life in your life are going to change. But these negative emotions you’re feeling are not going anywhere. Loneliness, disappointment, anger. And I said, it’s not a problem. You’re just a human, you know, like we all are, and there’s no need to fix it.

So kind of like we talked about it’s part of that, developing a relationship with it. So I said to her, listen, you know, you’re going to always feel anger at some point in life that things are going to change, but it’s always going to be there. So you get to decide how you want to start developing that relationship. I,

of course, I blew her mind out trying to explain that to her, but I tried my best. So the same thing for anyone out there listening, right? Like what if we didn’t, if you weren’t afraid of feeling shame, if you weren’t afraid of feeling anger or rejection, imagine how you would show up in the world. If you weren’t afraid of feeling rejection,

if you just realized, yup. I’m going to go out there and get rejected 400 times. But on the 400, the first time I’m not, and then it’s going to feel fucking amazing. Imagine how you would, how you would show up if you weren’t afraid of feeling failure or whatever emotions for you come with failure, humiliation, shame, whatever that might be inadequacy.

Like you show up very differently as you invite these emotions in again, you don’t have to love them, but you can just invite them as part of your experience. So I guess my, my tough love is get used to it. These things aren’t going anywhere. Okay, guys, before we wrap up any last words? No, I think I said all the good stuff.

All right. This has been a wonderful episode. Thank you of your listeners for tuning in. If you like, what you heard today, please go ahead and give us a five star review and a written review so we could read it out on our next episode. If you haven’t already please subscribe to the YouTube channel and click on the bell. So you get notified each time you’re releasing a new episode,

which is weekly. Check out our show notes. We’ve got a lot going on in the show notes, how to be a Patreon, how to get into the Facebook group. So you can join us for the gay men’s brother had zoom Hangouts, which again will be May 26th. And we’ll be talking about mental health. And of course joined the gay men’s brotherhood membership.

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Thank you for showing up today as always being authentic and sharing your wisdom. All right. See you guys next time. Bye guys.