It's not you, it's me. Seriously.

I deliver today’s message from a space of vulnerability that hasn’t always come easy for me to express. Society, even my personal audience who follows me, pressures men to behave, feel, sense, and show emotion that meet specific criteria as what it means to be a man. I have always felt like I have had a soft and sensitive heart but it was my environment that has hardened the edges often making it hard to let such love flow. From a young age I have been taught to “be tough” and “suck it up.” Crying is for girls. Emotions, yeah those are too. And don’t even think about expressing your insecurities openly to anyone, men don’t do that. 

This paradigm has contributed to major issues in men regarding self awareness. If we as men have grown up our entire lives in shame of our thoughts and emotions that make us vulnerable, how are we supposed to know how to express ourselves? If we have been told, and never taught, how are we as men going to be understanding of how to listen to our emotions, sit with them, and let go of the ideals creating such behaviors? 

Generation after generation the cycle continues. Sports and other competitive activities promote macho masculinity and further the problem. The only way to parent a boy is to make them be tough, I mean, who wants a sissy little boy? That’s the problem. I’m a sissy little boy. 

What?

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