Why don’t men say what we think (and see)?
I’m starting something new today.
I’ve had roughly the same morning routine for the past two years.
5 AM wake up, workout, coffee, Bible & prayer, breakfast, get to work.
This routine has served me well. It forced me to build daily habits that got my day off to a good start. There’s more to me than there was when I started.
Today something new is springing up. Seems appropriate, since it’s almost Spring.
I’m going to get up and write.
Before my workout, my Bible reading, before breakfast, before social media, email, etc.
Every day.
For a while.
And see what comes out.
There will be some hot takes and some cool ones.
You’re going to like some of them and hate others.
Thats ok. If you don’t like it, assume I didn’t make it for you.
If you do like it, I did make it for you. I’m glad you like it.
My practice for this season is to write and post every weekday morning.
No ChatGPT.
No stock photos.
Just what I’m thinking, and a photo that reflects something true about me.
Kind of a like a diary that I’m sharing with you.
Here’s what’s coming to me today.
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One of the patterns that I’ve seen in myself and in other men is that we don’t say what we think.
We don’t speak the truth.
We don’t speak the truth about what we really want in life, or what we’re scared of. What we long for. What we know. What we like. What we hate.
When I say “speak the truth” and “say what you think”, I’m not talking about it in a selfish, impulsive, pleasure seeking way.
Not in a petulant, childlike way of “I’ll tell YOU what I think!”
Not in the self-indulgant way that yet another “bro-caster” might yammer vapidly on yet another podcast.
What I’m talking about is this: we have allowed something - probably fear - to keep us from sharing our heart, our wisdom, our experience of life, with those closest to us.
Men: our families are DYING to know the answers to these questions:
What does life look like from behind your eyeballs?
What do you make of your experience of reality?
What is of ultimate concern to you?
What would you do if you were unafraid?
What do you love?
When I talk to men about this problem, many of them weep. That’s how I know I’ve touched a nerve. I see a lot of men who have been conditioned to keep their thumb tightly clamped down on the end of the garden hose, cutting off the river of life within them.
I wonder: why?
What are the forces that conspire to make us collectively clamp down and stop up the river of life that wants to flow from us, for the healing and flourishing of our family, our domain, our community, our life?
Seven years ago when I came to Christ and was set free from 30+ years of addiction, one of the profound shifts that I experienced was what it was like to SPEAK THE TRUTH.
To live the truth.
Of course I was no longer lying about everything, because I no longer had anything to lie about it, but it was more than that. As I began walking with Christ, I began experiencing the truth of reality in a way that liberated me to say what I thought and be who I was.
Again, I’m struggling with the language here. I think what I mean when I say “speak the truth” and “say what you think” … at least part of what I mean is “say what the experience of reality looks like from behind your eyeballs”.
When I was addicted to porn and pursuing illicit sexual encounters, of course I couldn’t reveal what the world truly looked like from behind my eyeballs. It wasn’t something I could have revealed because it would have exposed my sin.
Getting liberated from that constraint - of clamping my thumb on whatever wanted to flow through me - was a relief that I experienced deeply.
I felt it in my body.
When we cut off the flow of what wants to come through us, for whatever reason, there’s actually a physical price we pay. One of the physical symptoms I experienced in my body was a deep pain, way down in my gut and groin.
It HURT to stop off the flow of what wanted to come through me.
I am not a doctor, and I’m not making any medical claims here, but simply exploring the edges of what might be possible. I have a theory based on my own experience and the anecdotal evidence of people I’ve observed. I could be completely wrong, but I don’t think I am.
Please hear me when I say this: I’m not talking about any one man, or one situation, and I’m not victim blaming. I’m just trying to tease out a pattern that I think I see. If there was a way to measure this (and if I was a betting man), I would place a bet on this correlation:
I bet there’s an inverse relationship between men getting diseases like prostate cancer and the level of freedom they feel to be who they are and to say what they think.
I know that’s a wild thing to say, but hear me out.
When I don’t feel free to be who I am and say what I think, (not in an impulsive, hedonistic, or childlike way, but in a deeply true way, seeking to honor the design of my Creator and serve His creation), there is something that happens at the level of my nervous system that causes my body to tense up subconsciously.
My insides get “wound around the axle” by the false-ness in my own life. I mean, it has to be that way, since there is a part of me that carries the imprint of the Divine, who IS truth and love. So there’s a part of me that KNOWS the truth at some level and KNOWS when I’m not living in alignment to it.
I think that dissonance (though it’s largely subconscious) shows up in my nervous system and over time it creates patterns in my body, to include my facial expressions, posture, movement patterns, inflammation, and has implications for my immune system, emotions, endocrine system, and much more.
I think over time, the tension in my body leads to a lack of lymphatic drainage, lack of proper fascia movement, lack of blood flow, and creates an environment in my body that is prone to disease. I suspect that that disease is often localized to the parts of my body that carry the most tension.
Again - I’m not a scientist or a doctor, and what I know about these systems you could put in sewing thimble and have room to shake it around.
In my experience, when I have faced my fear of what people think and showed up “true” to my design, and said what I really think, the tension in my gut and my groin has reduced. The pain is going away.
There’s a high price to pay for cutting off the flow of life.
There’s a high price to pay for not speaking the truth.
I’ll explore in future blog posts about WHY I think we lie (or don’t say what we think) and what the forces are that have conspired to keep us locked up, clamped down and out of the flow of life, love, and truth.
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That’s enough for today. If I make these too long I won’t be able to write one every day.
I do want to write one every day for a while - I think this constraint will force me to clarify my thinking and get to the truth of what I’m experiencing. I think it will make me wiser and more tuned in to God.
Thanks for reading this.
I appreciate you!
Talk soon.
