What I Learned in Therapy

Hey, welcome back to what I Learned
in Therapy with me, Jamie Lang what I

learned in Therapy is a podcast about
philosophy and healing and storytelling.

And through storytelling, I try
to impart some of the wisdom I've

learned as a therapist and a yoga
teacher, and practitioner, and

a person deeply rooted in trying
to make the world a better place.

I am the owner of a healing
center called the Vault.

at the vault.

I do a lot of group work where I
have cohorts of women going through

my curriculum that I created.

It's a two year curriculum
based on Buddhism deep

philosophy and yoga philosophy.

It's pretty spectacular and
people are finding deep change

and deep transformation.

It's some of the most spectacular work.

I don't even know how to explain it.

So I'm just gonna direct you to head
over to the website that's located in the

show notes and go to the digital course
and you'll find out what you can learn.

Mostly this podcast is a thesis in
how to be a more healed and more kind,

less violent and loving human being.

And today I'm gonna start with a story I,

A few years ago, my husband and I
took our son on a baseball trip.

He played club baseball
and we traveled all over.

It felt like we traveled every
weekend for three summers.

Uh, it was.

It was actually incredible.

I miss it.

I miss it a lot.

One particular trip, we went to Utah
and it was in a very, very small town.

Very rural, . And after one of their
games, the last game of the day where

they had lost and hadn't played very
well, my son and I were walking back

to our car while my husband grabbed
the chairs and all the other stuff

that you take to a baseball game.

And as we ventured further into the
parking lot, we heard a man yelling.

And as we rounded the corner,
we saw one of the dads on our

baseball team berating his son.

The dad's fingers pointing
into the child's face.

My son and I stopped and we
watched him continue to tell

his son what a failure he was

because they lost the baseball game, a
baseball game in some remote town in Utah.

I,

he saw us and.

Buttoned himself up,

and I stared at his son as we walked by.

This boy gritting his teeth, tears
coming out of his eyes relentlessly

despite his profoundly desperate
desire to keep them in.

I will never forget that day, and
I'll bet you that boy won't either.

So I'm asking some
difficult questions today.

The first is what happens when
boys are never allowed to feel?

What becomes of boys
whose softness was stolen?

What becomes of a man whose
softness was stolen in childhood

with violence and neglect?

And what does it look like to
lead with and without love?

Today's episode is not about politics.

It's about emotional lineage.

It's about the trauma that
lives in the shadows of power.

It's about what I see in the
therapy room every single week.

Grown men trying to return
to the parts of themselves.

They never got to feel, it's like
looking for a needle in the haystack.

It's close.

So close, but they just can't find it.

'cause they were forced
to leave it behind.

Bonito Mussolini is the father of fascism.

He is a man whose name became
synonymous with control and

censorship and, and violence.

But what if we begin before the salutes,
before the parades, before the Iron Grip?

Because please consider
this as hard as it may be.

Mussolini was a baby once

a child, a 2-year-old, a
3-year-old, a 4-year-old.

Not just

a human being, but a, a
human being with a soul.

It reminds me of what I say
at the end of yoga classes.

Often

I say, remember, there was a time
when you were just a possibility.

And then you happened to the world
and the world was never the same.

And then the world happened to
you and you were never the same.

And the reciprocity of that
change has been happening long

before you took your first breath.

And it will keep happening
long after you take your last.

What you do in this world
is what you leave behind.

Mussolini embodies this so well.

He was born to a father
who beat him regularly.

An angry man, an unpredictable man,
an emotionally incarcerated man.

Emotional incarceration.

Kind of just chew on that for a second.

I recently heard this term on
one of my most favorite podcasts.

It's called Higher Learning with
Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay.

It's a really good podcast.

I can't recommend it more to anyone.

Um, so go check that out.

But they recently had an author and healer
named Jason Wilson on their show, he

spoke about how the world neglects men,
neglects boys, how men neglect boys, and

how that cycle of violence repeats itself
over and over producing the same product.

violent men, violent boys, violent men.

And he used this term
emotional incarceration

for men who were boys abused.

And abused and abused.

Neglected.

And neglected.

Neglected,

And I have to believe that
Mussolini's father was emotionally

incarcerated For him to be able
to do what he did to his son,

his mother was a devout woman to
her husband and to her church I,

there was probably very
little comfort for him.

Very little warmth, very little empathy.

Very little witnessing of his pain.

No place for him to rest.

No place to practice.

Healthy anger.

Healthy fear.

Healthy pain.

By 10 years old, Mussolini was stabbing
classmates with pocket knives By 15,

he was expelled for violent outbursts

by 20.

He was writing rage fueled manifestos,
trying to find language for a

fire that no one helped him hold.

No one taught him how to hold that fire
responsibly, and then he found power,

or rather the performance of power.

There is no such thing as power.

You can't pick up power and hold it.

It is an idea that we perform.

And this public stage gave him
the attention he never received.

And of course, he soaked
it up like a dry sponge.

I imagine that all of this made him
feel real seen for the first time.

And inside of him was still the boy who
had been beaten, silenced, and shamed.

So I think it's important to
just pause the narrative for a

moment and go back in time to a
Catholic boarding school in Italy.

It was there in his early youth that
Mussolini was subjected to frequent

corporal punishments, a child.

Subjected to frequent corporal punishment,
and this child had come from a family who

had already beaten him and neglected him.

He was caned, forced into isolation,
publicly humiliated amongst his peers.

These were not like occasional
disciplinary actions.

They were a part of systematic fear.

They were a part of a system designed
with control to inspire fear in boys.

It was an all boys school.

It's like a factory of violence.

He was also socially ostracized.

Of course, nobody liked him.

Shocking.

He had no friends, he had no mentors,
no one to say, Hey, I see your anger.

How can I help you?

Everything about you matters.

This kind of environment for
boys doesn't teach morality.

Perhaps it was even amoral.

It's not teaching kindness,
it's not teaching empathy.

It's teaching survival.

That's not the kind of survival
we're trying to teach children.

I imagine the strategy that Mussolini
internalized was like so many boys

before him, and so many boys now, was
to harden himself, harden his heart,

harden his ideas, harden his empathy.

If he had any,

He was taught to deny himself the freedom
of expressing his primal experiences.

Neuroscience tells us that when
children endure chronic punishment

and social exclusion, their brains
adapt by overacting the amygdala.

Which means that the body begins
to prepare for constant threat.

The brain also adapts by under
developing the prefrontal cortex.

This part of the brain is responsible
for emotional regulation, and

when it is impaired so young, it
impairs the ability to regulate.

And the hippocampus, which stores
memory and supports learning is

altered with high cortisol levels.

The brain also adapts by storing
the trauma in the body in the

form of tight muscles, shallow
breathing, digestive dysfunction.

Your tummy always hurts.

Disconnection from empathy and
hyper, hyper, hyper vigilance.

We therapists, uh, we call this
developmental trauma, but in the

wild it often gets misread as
leadership, charisma, confidence,

even genius.

But here's what Mussolini
did, courtesy of his trauma.

Mussolini outlawed public crying.

Nobody can cry on the street.

You can't cry in your car.

You can't cry at the grocery store.

You can't cry when someone
punches you in the face.

He criminalized dissent.

And persecuted softness.

He did not only repress a nation,

he was reenacting his own repression.

I mean, I really believe that,

but wasn't allowed in him,
became illegal in anyone else.

He ruled with fear because he had
only ever known fear and of course.

The ultimate hubris in the end,
he was executed by his own people,

hung upside down in a public square.

That public humiliation that he
had experienced as a child came

back full circle in his karma.

A man devoured by the very
power that once protected him.

And this brings me to one
of his most favorite quotes.

He said, it is better to live one day
as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.

And I remember reading this for the first
time and having chills down my spine

and my immediate response was something
like, what if I told you it is better

to live one day without violence?

To know the softness of your own heart,
to experience the safety of love than to

live 1000 years armored in power and fear.

You know, there's no reason
to pathologize Mussolini.

Yeah, he did really,
really, really bad things.

But what we need to do more is stop
pathologizing and start understanding.

In simple terms, boys who are
not safe do not develop the tools

to feel safe in their bodies.

They become young men who mistrust.

Connection.

Connection.

This is the essence of having
consciousness connection.

They learn to see tenderness as a threat.

Underneath most unfeeling men is
a boy who never allowed to feel.

As I've mentioned, I love
Buddhism and I love to study it.

I'm not a Buddhist.

In any way, shape, or form, just a
reminder, but I love what it has to

teach us, and one of its most prominent
precepts is non-violence, non harming.

And in Sanskrit, that word is a himsa.

I have a podcast episode about
it, if you wanna check it out.

Aza non-violence is a sacred
vow to the self, to others,

to the world, to the earth.

It is a discipline of the heart.

It asks not only that we refrain
from physical harm, but that we meet

ourselves and others with reverence,
nonviolence, and imagine if someone

had done this for Mussolini, the
young Mussolini, the very, very young

Mussolini, and said, Hey, you're angry.

Of course, you're angry,
you've been harmed.

It's okay that you're angry,
you've been harmed, you've never

been allowed to express your pain.

I'm here.

I am here.

Imagine had his father placed his hand
on his back gently instead with his fist

and said, your tears are welcome here.

It would've altered history.

A

a lot of men ask me,
how do I help my wife?

She has all this pain,
she has all this trauma.

What can I do to help her?

And while the question seems for the
sake of their wife, but I often get

the sense that the question is asked
to relieve the anxiety of the husband.

Not to actually help her,

but to help him,

to relieve him of the discomfort he
feels in the presence of her pain.

And this is also in part because he
has never been allowed to feel his own.

Of course, he has no
tolerance for her pain.

And so I turn to him every
single time and I say, sir.

Heal yourself.

Your wife is harmed.

Your wife has anxiety
because a man has hurt her.

It may not be you,

but it was someone.

So heal yourself.

It begins with men.

It'll always begin with men.

Mussolini and so much of his
story is a tragedy for sure

in so many ways.

Victor.

Frankl's Life gives us a profound example
of human resilience and think the power of

choice that is debatable, I suppose, but.

Even in the most unimaginable
circumstances, we still have choice.

Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist
and neurologist, but he's most

well known for surviving the
Holocaust and then writing about it.

He spent years enduring
Nazi concentration camps.

And then he developed a therapeutic
philosophy called Logotherapy,

which is centered on finding
meaning in all forms of suffering.

It's kind of my jam.

Frankl's personal story is critical
to understanding his message, though

he was a Jewish man, born in 1905,
who was taken along with his family

to concentration camps in 1942.

Frankl's mother and brother
were murdered in the camps.

His wife, whom he had married after the
war, was also killed by the Nazis Frankl

himself was subjected to the horrors,

forced labor starvation,
constant humiliation and abuse.

He spent over three years imprisoned
in Auschwitz and other camps.

In these circumstances and
all of this suffering, Frankl

noticed something extraordinary.

He saw that even in the most.

Horrific circumstances.

Some people found a way to maintain their
sense of dignity, their humanity, and

their ability to choose their response.

Just let that settle.

When's the last time you reacted at
your partner, your friend, or your

boss, your child, and you could
have chosen a better response.

Some people found a way to maintain their
sense of dignity, their humanity, and

their ability to choose their response
under the most horrific of circumstances.

Frankl wrote a book.

It's his seminal work called
Man's Search for Meaning.

I cannot recommend it enough.

There are not words to express
how profound this book is.

I recommend you get it.

And while it is not a long book, I
encourage you to move slowly through it.

He wrote, quote, everything can be taken
from a man, but one thing, the last of the

human freedoms to choose one's attitude
in any given set of circumstances,

to choose one's own way, end quote.

Even in a death camp,
everything stripped away.

Frankl realized that these Nazis could
not take from him his ability to choose

how he responded to his suffering.

This is what led him to develop
logotherapy, which asserts that our

primary drive in life is not pleasure.

As Freud mentioned, or power
as Adler proposed, but in the

search for meaning, I agree.

This meaning Franco believed could
be found even in the most extreme

suffering, and it was in that
search that we find the freedom to

choose a better way of suffering.

For Frankl, softness wasn't a luxury.

It was a form of strength,
a path to survival, a way

of embracing one's humanity.

Even when faced with inhumanity.

This is the kind of survival
we need to be teaching boys.

I think the question is not
whether men can be soft.

They can.

I sit across from men every week and
they're so kind in their vulnerability.

They find compassion for themselves.

So I know it's already there.

The question I think is, is everybody
willing to make that kind of change?

Is everybody willing to let men disarm
themselves and show their vulnerability?

Because everybody has to be on board.

I think for a lot of men, the
therapy room is where this begins,

but the world is where it continues.

And friendship, fatherhood,

employment.

Community making policy, creating art,
and most importantly, how men speak to

the boys in their lives and how men speak
to the ones still living inside of them.

Practicing softness In a hard world,
I don't think that's weakness.

I think it is repair for
generations of trauma handed down

to men without their consent.

You know, I don't get on
my soapbox for men ever,

but they have been handed generations
of trauma without their consent

What I learned in therapy this week
is that there's a particular kind of

grief I keep seeing in my male clients.

It's kind of undefinable,
but it's always there.

It's this feeling that they are lost,
ached, and volatile, and they're

so scared with nowhere to put it.

Like I said, it doesn't always
announce itself, but it sits quietly

in the room, like a third presence.

It hides behind clenched
jaws and clenched hands,

shallow breath and shoulders
that never quite drop.

A voice that speeds up when we get close
to anything tender, and a joke that puts

a period at the end of the sentence.

It's the grief of boys who became men
without ever being allowed to stay soft.

Sometimes a man will say something
in session that breaks my

heart open with its tenderness.

Like I cried this week, or I
told my son I was proud of him.

I let myself miss my dad.

It's like these moments of confessions.

And I say, these are sacred.

These are sacred.

This is the strength with roots.

This is what feeling sounds like.

This is softness and it's a practice.

A spiritual, a relational,
a therapeutic, a practice.

It is not the opposite of power.

It is the reclaiming of power that
was once shamed, silenced, or severed,

and then I wait for them to feel.

Even if it's hard, I invite you to
reach out to the men in your life.

I,

and in some way, let them know even if you
have to speak their language in a joke.

Tell them it's okay to be scared.

Tell them that their tears are welcome.

Tell them to bring their pain.

You're willing to see it.

Thank you for listening.

Now go spray.

Paint that big old world out
there with all of your love.