I’ve created a totally free (no catch) tool called The Gut Check. It’s designed to help grieving men, and their partners understand what’s happening them. It has a built in interactive coach that will help you see what’s going on and what to do about it.

I’m going to write a series of articles based on what people are asking the coach about so I can help with the problems that are most important to you. This is article is one of them.

Take the Gut Check Now

You’re all sitting around the dinner table, making another attempt at a “family dinner.” He’s pushing his food around his plate while the kids are trying to tell him about their day. All he can muster up are grunted one-word answers. They think their dad is acting this way because they’ve done something wrong. You’re wondering the same thing about yourself.

You’ve been watching this movie on repeat for months and you’re at your wit’s end. You’ve tried to get through to him and you’re at the point of wanting to grab him by the shoulders and scream in his face. You feel completely alone and you know he must too.

Maybe he lost his father last spring. Maybe the two of you lost a child, and you’re grieving alone in the same house. Maybe it was a friend who knew him before you did. Whoever it was, he hasn’t been the same since and it’s looking more and more like he never will be again.

You’ve asked what’s wrong and gotten “nothing.” You’ve told him you miss him and watched him look at you sadly and say nothing. You’ve cried, and he left the room. You’re not sure how many more times you can stand having the door slammed in your face.

He’s not gone. He’s hiding, and a man who’s hiding can come back.

Shutting Everyone is Damn Hard Work

To you, it looks like he’s stopped caring about you, the kids and everything else that used to matter.

The absence is real, painful, and you’re not imagining it. There are two kinds and it’s important to know the difference. The first is a man who’s stopped loving you and checked out because he doesn’t care anymore. The second is a man who’s using everything he’s got to keep a lid on the roiling hell inside him. There’s nothing left over for dinner conversation, the kids’ games, or for you. It’s so easy to mistake the latter for the former.

He has things he wishes he could say but is afraid what’ll happen if he says them. They’ve been at the tip of his tongue countless times and he can’t make his lips say the words. The risk is too high.

He’s barely keeping his shit together and keeping his emotions and the people he loves at arm’s length is the only way to keep the train on the tracks. If he opens up he’ll have to feel the guilt, shame and regret for all the “what-ifs” and “if-onlys.” He’s in a constant battle with himself and it’s killing him. And somehow it still seems like the least worst option.

This didn’t start with the loss. Somewhere, a long time ago, he learned that emotional men are weak men. They’re unpredictable, and fold when things get hard. They let down the people who are counting on them. Strong feelings hurt people and his job is to keep everyone safe. The loss didn’t teach him any of that. It took a system he’s been living with a long time and turned it up as far as it goes.

He didn’t choose the rules he’s living by. He knows he’s giving you one-word answers. What he doesn’t know is that the rules are rules. To him they look like the truth. He isn’t waking up each morning deciding to give you nothing. Under the surface, where he can’t see it, some part of him believes the silence is the most loving thing he has left to offer.

Why Reaching for Him Backfires

Every attempt to break through the walls he’s put up has left you with shorter answers, earlier escapes from the room, and more hours in the garage. It’s maddening. How are you supposed to reach him without reaching for him?

“We need to talk” feels like a performance review he already knows he’s failing. Your tears, your frustration, the words “you’re never present” don’t sound like love to him. They’re proof of the exact thing he’s trying to prevent. He’s hurting you.

Put yourself in his shoes and follow his logic. If he’s hurting you when he’s silent, he’d hurt you worse if he uncorked the demons trying to destroy him. The safest version of himself is the one who says and shows the least. The harder you reach, the more necessary his behaviour feels.

Which means the fix isn’t pushing harder to get him to talk. It’s changing the words you use when you are talking to him.

Say It So He Can Hear It

“You’re never present” and “I miss you” mean the same thing but land completely differently. But the first tells him he’s failed you again. The second tells him you still want and need him. He probably couldn’t explain the difference, but try it and see what happens. One will make him leave the room. You’ve already seen that. The other just might make him look up at you.

Here are a few changes worth practicing. Instead of “You never talk to me anymore,” try “I miss hearing what’s on your mind.” “You need to deal with this” becomes “I want to be in this together with you.” “What’s wrong with you?” becomes “I love you even when you’ve got nothing to say.”

You might have noticed a pattern in those suggestions. Speaking from “you” is an indictment of him. Speaking from “I” is sharing your experience. An indictment gives him something to fight. He’ll start building the defense case before you’ve finished the sentence. Your experience gives him nothing to fight, and a man with nothing to defend can actually listen.

You’re not saying anything new. You’re saying it so he can hear it.

Let’s be real. You’ve probably said some version of these already and gotten nothing back. Say them anyway, and don’t expect them to work the moment they come out of your mouth.

He might give you the same nod and the same silence for weeks. It’ll make you want to give up. Keep trying. What you’re doing in those weeks is proving, one sentence at a time, that talking to you doesn’t end with a list of everything he’s done wrong.

Ask for a Drive, Not a Conversation

Stop aiming for the magic conversation you’ve been rehearsing, where he bares his soul and cries on your shoulder. Aim for one small yes instead. Ask him to come for a drive Saturday, to stay for the whole game, to help you move the shelves in the basement.

He’ll say no sometimes, and maybe the first three (or twenty) times. A no to the drive doesn’t mean the marriage is failing, and it doesn’t mean you asked wrong. He’s checking whether the drive comes with hidden expectations attached, and the only way he learns it doesn’t is repetition. Keep your asks small, keep making them and remember that keeping them small means a no costs you both almost nothing.

And when you get the yes, go side by side, not face to face. Men say hard things when nobody’s looking at them, in the truck, on a walk, or while they’re fixing something. Eye contact across a table feels threatening enough to make him avoid it.

If he’s in the garage every night, or buried in a project, or training for something, it doesn’t have to mean he’s hiding from you. Some men do their grieving with their hands. Ask him what he’s building. You might learn more from that answer than from asking how he feels.

And don’t diagnose him, despite how much you want to. Trying to convince him to talk to someone is you understandably trying to get him to talk to anyone. “You’re depressed” might even be true, and it will still land like an attack, because it tells a man who already feels like he’s failing at everything that he’s failing at this too.

Patience Has a Limit

None of this is fair. You didn’t teach him to hide, and you shouldn’t have to be the one trying to get him to stop. You’re doing more than your share right now, and it can feel unbearable. You’re paying the price for a problem you didn’t create. It’s ok to be honest about it, at least to yourself.

And still, none of this means tiptoeing around him forever. You’re grieving too. You lost what he lost, or you’re losing him, or both at once, and your grief doesn’t have to play second fiddle to his.

You can tell him the truth about you without handing him a deadline. “I’m lonely in this house” is honest, and he can hear it. “Fix this by Friday” puts you in charge of the timeline for another person’s healing, and nobody has ever healed on someone else’s schedule.

After our daughter died, my wife told me that she understood that the next five years were going to be brutal. She wasn’t giving me a timeline. She was telling me that she was in this for the long haul.

There’s a difference between patience and saying nothing about what you need. Patience is a gift to the other person. Saying nothing teaches you both that your needs don’t count, and it builds a resentment that destroys relationships.

If his silence ever turns into talk of being a burden, of everyone being better off without him, or of not being around, that’s not hiding. It’s an emergency. Too many men think about taking their own lives after a devastating loss. Call or text a helpline at findahelpline.com, with him or without him, the same day. He’ll probably say he’s fine. He’s not.

What Coming Back Actually Looks Like

It probably won’t look like a deep, heartfelt conversation. It might look like him saying yes to the drive. Or look like him going to the game and even staying for the whole thing. Or sticking around when you ask him a question.

Each of those moments is important because when he comes back to you, it will likely be one small yes at a time.

If you want to understand your partner, The Gut Check has a version built for you, not him. It takes a few minutes and it’ll show you how he protects himself and what you can do that might help.

Damon got sober in Costa Rica after seven months of drinking and drugs took him somewhere he didn’t want to be. He doesn’t call himself an addict. He calls it an abusive relationship with alcohol, and we spent some time on why that language matters.

From there we got into how change really works. I shared the difference between technical problems and the deeper ones, the kind where the real obstacle is a belief you’ve been treating as fact your whole life. I walked through a real example of a woman who couldn’t make time to eat well, and how the thing stopping her had nothing to do with willpower or knowing what to do.

Damon came at the same territory from a different angle. He works with parts, the idea that we’re not one single mind but a system of protectors doing their best to keep us from feeling old pain. Different maps, same terrain. Most of what stops us from changing is a protection system we’re not fully aware of.

I told Damon about the scariest thing I’ve ever done, which was looking at my daughter’s body at her funeral. And the second scariest, which was learning to drop out of my head and be present with what was happening in my body. I resisted that for years. I thought the body stuff was nonsense. It turned out to be the thing that changed everything.

We closed on why men need other men. Not advice. Not fixing. Being witnessed by another man when you finally the vulnerable things out loud. Most men have never had that anywhere in their lives, and most don’t know they need it until they feel it.

The thing holding you back isn’t weakness. It’s protection, and most men have no idea what theirs looks like.

If you’ve lost someone and you’re still going to work, still paying the bills, still telling everyone you’re fine, I built a free tool that shows you what’s actually going on.

It takes about ten minutes and it’ll name the pattern you’ve been living inside without knowing it. It’s called The Gut Check

And if you love a man who’s lost someone and you can’t reach him anymore, there’s a version built for you too.

Take the Gut Check

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He’s changed since the loss.

He’s up before everyone. He mows the lawn whether it needs mowing or now. He stays at work longer than he ever used to. He answers every “how are you doing” with “good, busy,” and you know he’s shutting down the conversation and shutting you out. Or maybe he doesn’t do any of that. Instead, he snaps at the kids over nothing, or is so zoned out he seems like he’s in a waking coma.

Either way, it’s obvious something is wrong. What’s hard is putting a name to it. It’s easy to label it as a short temper, him pulling away, or turning into a machine who only knows how to work. It’s rarely seen for what it actually is, which is a man in grief who doesn’t know any other way to deal with it.

I’ve spent a long time around men and grief, and I’ve come to understand that most men protect themselves after a devastating loss, and they get damn good at it. It tends to show up in one of four ways:

• Some become hyper-producing fixers.

• Some become the rock everyone leans on and never let anyone, including themselves, see how brutal it is for them.

• Some get angry, because anger helps them temporarily forget how powerless they really are.

• And some shut down so completely that you can’t reach them, even when they’re sitting right beside you.

The busy one looks driven. The rock looks strong. The angry one looks scary. The quiet one looks checked out. None of it looks like grief, and that’s the problem, because the man doing it usually can’t see it either.

I know this because I was that man. I spent years not being able to see it and I paid the price for it. So did the people I love who didn’t die.

So I built something to help him, and you, see it.

It’s called the Gut Check. It’s five minutes, it’s free, and it won’t ask anyone to talk about their feelings. It asks a set of plain questions and then shows which of those four a man is most likely doing right now, what it’s costing the people around him, and what tends to help.

This is truly free. There’s no catch.

It isn’t therapy and it isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a mirror. Most people who take it recognize the man in it, sometimes for the first time.

There are two ways to use it.

If you’re a man reading this and any of it landed, take it for yourself. You’ll get a hell of a lot more clarity on where you actually are, and an interactive coach you can talk it through with afterward.

And if you’re reading this about the man you love, because you’re the one closest to it, there’s a version built for you. You answer for what you’ve actually seen from the outside, and it tells you what’s likely going on with him, what tends to help you reach him, and what tends to push him further away. There’s an interactive coach for you too to help you talk through how to support him.

You’ll find both at GutCheck.tools

One more thing. If he’s in real trouble or you don’t feel safe, the Gut Check will point you to help, wherever you are in the world. It was built with safety in mind from the start.

Take it, or send it to the man who needs it. Five minutes. It’ll tell you more than “I’m fine” ever could.

Take the Gut Check Now

Over the years, I’ve heard too many men say some version of, “I don’t know what she wants from me.”

You’re probably showing up the way you think you’re supposed to. Or at least doing your best to mostly be a good partner. No one’s perfect, after all.

You go to work and pay the bills. You come home most nights and tend not to do the things that wreck relationships. You’re not having affairs, gambling the house away or disappearing for three days at a time. Most people think you’re a pretty good guy.

So why does it feel like something’s missing that you can’t put your finger on? The fact that you’re asking yourself, after all this time, is the problem.

She’s told you what she needs, probably too many times to count. You heard a list, and probably went to work on it. For a while. You bought her flowers a few times and even planned a weekend getaway. You try to help her fix things when she’s upset, even before she asks you to.

None of it seems to be working. She’s stopped bringing it up and now, when you ask her what’s wrong, all you get is “I’m fine,” and you both know it isn’t true. You’re out of ideas on what to do next so you’ve decided she’s unhappy and there’s no pleasing her. You’ve filed it away under problems you can’t solve and moved on to the ones you can.

What she wants from you isn’t more of what you’ve been doing. She wants more than a man who completes tasks. She wants three things, and most men have no idea how to give them to her.

She wants to be seen. She wants to be understood. She wants to feel safe.

Seen Means Noticing Her Without Having to Be Told

See and acknowledge the invisible work that you never think about. She’s managing the appointments, birthdays, social relationships, and the never-ending list of what everyone in the house needs to be comfortable. And better yet, take some of it on to lighten her load.

Know the difference between recognition and appreciation and do both. And be specific. Recognition means acknowledging her for something she’s done. “Thank you so much listening to me when I’ve had a rough day at work.” Appreciation means honouring her for who she is. “I love your gentleness with the kids because it’s helping them become kind, compassionate human beings.”

Be the most interested person in the world in her. Care enough to be curious about her thoughts, emotions, fears, frustrations, wants and needs. Ask her about the things she cares about that have nothing to do with the house or kids. Understanding her will make it easier to love her.

Instead of saying, “You’re hot,” or “You’re beautiful,” say, “I find you so beautiful.” The first one is a judgement that she’s more likely to push back on. The second is you sharing your experience in a way that’s much easier for her to receive.

Stop what you’re doing and look at her when she talks to you, rather than your phone, the TV or your plate. Giving her half your attention when she needs all of it is another, very clear way of saying, “You’re not important me right now.”

Understood Means You Get It Without Fixing It

She does and says things that make perfect sense to her in the moment. Even if they don’t make sense to you and even if they don’t make common sense. Instead of trying to get her to think about things your way or correct her thinking, try to understand why they make sense to her. You’ll be amazed at what you learn.

When she comes to you and she’s upset, listen and say, “That sounds really hard,” and then shut the fuck up. She doesn’t want your magic solution to what you think her problem is. She wants to know you’re trying to understand where she’s coming from. You don’t have to agree or approve of her perspective. You just need to genuinely try to understand it.

Ask about her, rather than the just the facts. Men tend to interrogate so they can gather evidence for the repair job they think they’re supposed to provide. “What makes that so hard”, or “What do you wish they’d done instead?”, or “What did that bring up for you?”, is you trying to understand. One feels like a fact-finding mission and the other feels like she matters.

Learn the skills that make her want to talk to you. Instead of firing off a million questions, say back what you heard and let her correct you if needed. It helps her feel more in control of the conversation and helps her open up, which helps you learn more.

Be enough of a man to listen to her when the person she’s upset with is you. Getting defensive and pouting about it is doing nothing to help you understand what’s on her mind and heart. If you find yourself rationalizing it or making it about her, you’re being an idiot. We’re all idiots at times. Be able to recognize it when you’re being one.

Stop treating listening and helping like oil and water. She’s not against solutions. She’s against solutions she didn’t ask for from a man who couldn’t be bothered to understand the problem first. Prove to her you care enough to understand what she’s going through and she’ll often ask you for your take on her own. Your advice will be more welcome when she’s actually asked for it. And if she doesn’t ask, don’t give it to her anyway.

Bring it back up before she does. Remember what she told you and ask her about it. “It’s been a couple of days, how are you feeling about what happened? I know how heavy it was for you and wanted to check in?”

Safe Means She Can Count On You

Without safety, the other two don’t matter.

Safety means two separate things. The first is whether she can be honest with you without it costing her. If she can’t, she’ll learn it quickly and stop being honest. She’ll start managing you and choose to say nothing to keep the peace. Over time she’ll check out and you’ll call it a great marriage right up until the day she tells you it’s over.

The second is whether she can stop worrying about you doing something stupid and harmful to yourself, and your family. Can she go to sleep without wondering if you’ll go off the deep end when you’re out with your buddies? Can she be sure you won’t make an ass out of yourself when you’re in social situations? Can she be sure you won’t fly off the handle and get canned from your job?

Is she with a man whose judgement she can trust?

Deal with your shit. We all have it. Pretending you’re fine when you’re obviously not is passing your pain onto her without her consent. Seeing you actively do the work to heal from the trauma you’ve experienced, the losses you’ve suffered or the addictions you wrestle with will show her that you care enough about yourself to care about her.

Take ownership over the harm you’ve caused her. If you got drunk and embarrassed her, accept that it could take her years to stop worrying about it. That’s on you, brother. You don’t get to put a timeline on how long it takes someone to heal from the damage you’ve caused them. Recognize that she takes your “I’m sorry you feel that way,” for what they are. They’re you telling her she’s wrong.

Be the kind of predictable that means she isn’t on pins and needles for you to do something dumb. She’ll never be able to fully relax if you stick her with the job of having to keep an eye on you. Stop making her be your mother instead of your wife.

Make your word and reality the same thing. Make it easy for her to plan her life around you rather than having to make a backup plan for everything you say you’re going to do but don’t. Every kept word is a deposit in your joint emotional bank account and every broken promise is a withdrawal. Keep the balance high.

Never use what she shares with you against her. Be the man who listens to her, without judgement, and refuses to bring it up to win an argument or cause her more hurt than you think she’s causing you.

The Job You Didn’t Know You Had

You can provide and protect and still leave her feeling alone in her own house. Realizing what you thought was the right thing isn’t enough can be a tough pill to swallow. Now, on top of everything you’re already doing, you have to do more?

You don’t have to do anything else if you don’t want to. Many men don’t.

But if you show her that you see her, that you truly want to understand her, and that you’re the one place in her life where she can let down her guard, she stops having to keep one eye on you and finally gets to breathe. You’ll give her the space to truly love her.

Most men never find out that was the job until it’s too late.

I’m always trying to find ways to be useful to grieving men, and the people who love them.

I built something called the Gut Check. It shows you which of four patterns you’re using to cope with your loss and how it’s costing the people who live with you. It’s free, no strings attached, and it takes a few minutes.

Take the Gut Check Now

I’ve spent a lot of time around grief over the last fifteen years. Losing a wife and daughter will do that to you.

I’m facing it today, but I spent a long damn time trying to ignore it or distract myself from it. I’ve talked to hundreds of men over the years, and I’ve watched the same thing happen to almost all of us.

We tell ourselves we’re handling it because we’re still going to work, paying the bills and being the rock the people we love can lean on. Anything else is weakness and weakness won’t be tolerated. In other words, we understand almost nothing about what grief actually does to a man.

That ignorance is expensive as hell, and not only for us. It costs everyone who didn’t die.

Grief doesn’t usually show up as us crying on the couch sucking our thumbs. It shows up in the patterns we can’t see that take over our lives. They protect us from pain we're not ready to face, or don't yet know we need to.

There are four main ways we try to put the hardest stuff back in a box. I’ve seen all four up close, and I’ve seen them in the mirror.

You Don’t Get Angry. You Snap.

You’re constantly on edge and it seems to take almost nothing to shove you over it. It could be a cupboard door left open or someone asking a question with an obvious answer. It might be the fucking sun coming up, marking the start of a new day and new opportunities for people to piss you off.

Before you know it, you’ve lost it again. You’ve said things that make you wonder if you’re possessed. The people you care about are crying or the room has gone completely silent as they walk on eggshells around you. You’re standing there, feeling like a total asshole, telling yourself it’ll never happen again.

Except it will, and you know it. You couldn’t save the person who died and now you can’t save the people who didn’t…from you.

You’re the Fuse. The blowup was never about the cupboard. It was the only thing that made the powerlessness go away for even a minute.

You’re in the Room. Except You’re Not.

You're around, but you're not really there. You sit in the room with the people you love and your head is somewhere else the whole time. You mumble one or two word answers and even that takes everything you’ve got.

At night you keep the TV on or doom scroll like a zombie until you can't hold your eyes open, because going to bed means lying there in the dark with the pain, shame and regret. You don’t care about the things you used to and you can’t muster up the energy to care that you don’t.

The people who love you noticed a long time ago. They might still be trying to get through to you, or they might have given up. Everyone has a limit to how many times they’ll knock on a door you refuse to answer.

They haven't stopped caring. They've stopped being able to reach you. You’re causing them more pain than they’re already feeling.

You’re the Ghost. It’s easier to be anywhere else than where you’re forced to feel it all.

You Can’t Fix the One Thing. So You Fix Everything Else.

You handle it by doing. You get up earlier, take on more, say yes when you should say no, and fill the weekend with jobs. From the outside it looks like you’re dealing with it better than anyone. You’re at work and you’re getting things done. You’re the only one around you who doesn’t seem to be stuck in misery.

It’s not really about the list of jobs you need to get done. As long as there’s a problem to solve in front of you, there’s no time for the pain to consume you. A task is something you can figure out and complete. It feels like winning.

Confronting the fact that you can’t bring the person you lost back is the ultimate form of losing.

Everyone around you pays the price. They can’t tell you how they’re feeling because instead of listening, you see another problem in need of solving. They can’t talk to you because you can’t slow down long enough to listen. They want you, not your never-completed to-do list.

You’re the Fixer. If you stop, you fall apart, and you’re never going to let that happen.

Everyone Leans on You. You Won’t Tell Them How Tired You Are.

You’re the only one keeping the ship above water. You show up at work, take care of your family, and answer the call whenever someone needs you. When someone asks how you’re doing, you say you’re fine because there’s no alternative. A man is supposed to knuckle down and take care of his people.

Of course you aren’t fine. How could you be? But you’ve convinced yourself that the job is to keep your pain out of sight of everyone else. You’re there to shoulder their burdens, not add to them.

The weight of it all is crushing you but you can’t stop. If you do, everyone who’s counting on you is going down with you. You’d have failed your family like you failed the person you lost.

You’re the Rock. If you ever stop being the rock, everyone you love suffers. And you wouldn't be worth anything to anyone.

You Can’t Change What You Can’t See

The loss has exacted a heavier price on you than you knew was possible. And each of these patterns is adding to the cost by making you a stranger to the people you love and a slave to the pain you won’t face.

Changing these patterns can be unbelievably hard. There’s no magical moment where the clouds part, a light shines down from the heavens, and you suddenly get it. It takes the difficult, consistent, and painful work of facing your devastating loss and rebuilding your life after it.

For any of this to happen, you have to see it first. That’s the necessary first step, and it’s the only one you can take until you’ve taken it.

Introducing The Gut Check

The Gut Check is still in beta and I would love for you to try it out and give me feedback to make it better. It will always be free, and there are no hidden strings. It’s just me trying to help.

The Gut Check is a self-assessment built for men dealing with a loss. It’s based on a simple idea: most men don’t fall apart after a loss, they protect themselves. And they get so good at it, they can’t see what’s going on.

The Gut Check identifies which of the four protection patterns are showing up right now. The assessment surfaces the dominant one, with how the others stack up underneath, and shows him how heavy the cross he’s bearing really is. It’s twenty-nine questions, takes about five minutes, and the result is not a diagnosis or a label. It’s a mirror. It shows a man what he might already half-know about himself, written plainly, without therapy-speak or motivational bullshit. The result is a description he can recognize and an honest take on what it’s costing him.

After the result, there’s an interactive coach he can talk it through with. The coach is built using AI, designed in the Man Down voice. It already knows his results, it talks in normal language any guy can relate to, and it’s there any time he wants to come back to it. It’s not therapy, it’s not a person, and it’s not a replacement for either. It’s a place to think out loud about what came up and figure out what to do next.

A partner version is in development for the spouses and partners of grieving men, with its own assessment and its own coach, designed to help the people closest to a man understand what they’re seeing and how to help.

The whole thing is private to the user’s account, free to take, and built with safety as a non-negotiable. If a man’s answers point to him being in real trouble, the assessment says so plainly and points him to live crisis support wherever in the world he is. The coach does the same thing.

I can't undo what happened to my family. Being useful to other men, and the people who love them, has really helped. So here it is.

Take the Gut Check Assessment

I spent the first five years after my wife’s suicide drinking away a pain I didn’t know I was avoiding. I was an addict, and I couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see it, despite the mountains of evidence all around me. I still find it shocking to look back and reflect on the depth of my denial.

I did all the things addicts do. I lied to myself, and by extension I lied to the people who love me most. I lied about how much I was drinking. I lied about when I was drinking. I lied about quitting. I lied about wanting to quit. I lied about not feeling shame and embarrassment for all the stupid shit I did while I was drunk. I lied about having everything under control. I lied about lying. I lied to myself about being a liar.

It’s no surprise this had a profound impact on the woman who, by the grace of God, decided to marry me in the middle of all of it. I joke with her now about how questionable her decision making was at the time. The red flags couldn’t have been redder. To be fair to her, my lying hid how bad the problem really was for the first few years.

I finally stopped twelve years ago. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

The part I didn’t expect was that years into being sober, my wife would still remind me not to drink when we went out. At first it was easy to understand why she felt the need to say it. After two or three years, I started to find it annoying. What the hell? Couldn’t she see all the progress I’d made? Why was she so insistent on punishing me for the guy I used to be?

It took me a long time - too long - to understand and accept the harm I’d caused her. The lesson I kept refusing to learn is what this piece is about.

Feeling Their Pain Is the Easy Part

Empathy gets talked about as feeling what someone else feels. You’re told to imagine yourself in their situation, look at the world through their eyes, or to walk a mile in their shoes. Despite the fact that it can be challenging, this is still the easy version.

The hard version where you’re the one who’s caused someone else pain, and then letting the person you hurt decide what they need to heal and how long they need it. You don’t get a vote on their recovery. You gave up that right by being the one who caused the damage in the first place.

It can be hard as hell when the person you’ve hurt keeps bringing it up. When they keep reminding you of the thing you’d rather leave in the past, the last thing you want to do is sit there and take it. You’ll want to argue the size of it down so it’s clear that they’re overreacting. You might tell them they should be over it by now and remind them how much you’ve changed. You’ll go on the offense and accuse them of holding the past against you.

They’re all a different version of the same pattern. You’ve not only committed the crime, you’re the defense lawyer arguing for leniency and the self-appointed judge granting it, without once asking the victim.

Their Truth Doesn’t Have to Match Yours

Two people can live through the same period of time and walk away with completely different versions of what happened. To me, getting sober was a before and after moment. To her, those same years left an unease she still carries. Both of those were true.

The mistake is treating your version as the right one and continually trying to argue your case. You lay out your evidence, they lay out theirs, and you try to win when there’s nothing to win. Their perception was never going to be the same as yours, because we’re all having our own unique experience all the time. You were being you, and they were on the receiving end of you.

Empathy is one of the most powerful disciplines a person can develop. It’s a discipline and because it requires making a choice to believe what someone else is telling you. It’s especially hard to do when you’re feeling defensive and attacked.

It’s so important because it lets you stay connected to someone when your two versions of reality don’t line up. Without it, every difference turns into a standoff about who’s right. With it, you can hold that their reality is as legitimate to them as yours is to you. You’ll stop fighting for agreement and start working towards understanding.

Most people will defend their own version of events with their lives, because it’s the version where they look the best. Empathy requires that you deal with the fact that someone else doesn’t see you the way you wish they would.

Changing Doesn’t Erase the Record

I’d made a huge change in my life when I stopped drinking. I knew I’d never drink again. My mistake was thinking my certainty was the only thing that counted and her fear was just a failure to keep up with my transformation.

It wasn’t. Changing means you stop adding to the harm. It doesn’t magically rewind the clock and undo what’s been done. The person you hurt isn’t being unfair when they stay vigilant around you. They’re doing exactly what anyone would do after learning, the hard way, what you were capable of.

When you decide someone is making too big a deal of it, what you’re saying is that their pain has become an inconvenience to the story you’d rather tell about yourself. That’s the opposite of empathy. Empathy starts when you take that story out behind the woodshed and put it down for good.

You Don’t Get to Set the Clock

Even now, after all these years, my wife wouldn’t say she’s a hundred percent sure I’ll never drink again. I think she’d say she’s ninety-nine point nine nine percent sure. That’s a hell of a long way from a hundred.

She might carry that kernel of doubt for the rest of our lives. I did that. I put that burden on her, and we both have to live with it. I caused something I can’t take back, and the only thing still in my control is whether I acknowledge it, accept it and keep not drinking.

If you caused the harm, they set the timeline. Empathy is finally having the character to let both of those things be true at once.

I’ve lost my wife and daughter and I write about grief for men, the people who love them.

I’ve put together a free guide called 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (and No One Warns Them About).

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Click here for resources on grief for men, and the people who love them.

Genesis

It began with the birth of our first born so many years ago. I was nervous about changing diapers, but knew I’d dive right in. I even semi-willingly agreed to the idea of using reusable cloth diapers. Had the choice been mine alone, it would have been Pamper’s all day.

Washing them turned out to be an early rehearsal for where I find myself today. Thinking about it now makes me barf in my mouth, but I loved it at the time. My wife carried the little buggers around for nine months, felt sick most of the time, and pushed them out so quickly there was no time for painkillers. All I’d had to do was gain some sympathy weight.

So plunging my hand into the Diaper Genie and getting baby shit underneath my fingernails a few times a week was the least I could do. Once I mastered the art of mouth breathing, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined.

Before long, they were out of diapers. Even though it was never a conscious thought, I assumed the days of being involved with the excreta of others were behind me.

The Evolution of Pad

My wife is a beautifully complex, highly intelligent, and semi-tortured creative who feels as much of a connection with Mother Nature as I do with my kettlebells. She talks to her plants, rejoices in the smells and sounds of her garden, and believes recycling gets recycled rather than ending up as landfill in China. She’s German, so sweaters from grade nine still hang loyally in her closet, ready to be passed down to the next four generations.

In other words, we couldn’t possibly be more different.

She, like her garden, is ever evolving. It’s one of the things I love most about her. She’s committed to her own growth, and to living in alignment with her values. That means making conscious choices about what she invites into her life and what she lets go. Thankfully, she’s kept me around. So far.

It’s natural then, as the years have passed, her preferences in the products she uses have changed along with her. This includes feminine hygiene products. The convenience-oriented, earth-destroying disposable pads of her younger years no longer have a place in her menstrual experience.

They’ve been replaced with natural, reusable period pads. I remember my initial shock and mild revulsion when I found out these actually existed and realized she wasn’t kidding about using them.

Years ago, I walked into the bathroom and saw one soaking in water. Looking back, I can almost hear it crying out to me to wash it. My last conscious thought was, “I’d washed diapers. Could this really be any worse?” Before I knew it, the world faded away, the bar of soap become an extension of my body and I entered a flow state (pun intended). Chop wood, carry water, wash pad.

A few minutes later, I stepped back, admired my handiwork, warmed by the satisfaction of a job well done. That little manta ray didn’t look like a trauma patient any more. I’d restored it. It was a dopamine hit and as a stimulus-addicted ADHD train wreck, I was hooked. I marched over to my wife, probably bumped into a few corners on the way, and claimed ownership of all future pad washing. She didn’t try to talk me out of it.

Years later, and I’m still on the job, patiently waiting for the four to five days of twenty-eight where my services are required. Peri-menopause is messing with a schedule that used to be as predictable as the tides. But it’s also reminding me that my time as the Pad Washer-in-Chief is limited so I’d better appreciate it while it lasts.

Not everyone shares my enthusiasm for this task. Nothing turns the stomachs of my guy friends faster than hearing me talk about it. None of them has taken me up on my suggestion to try it themselves. Wimps.

I often reflect on why I love doing it so much, and have landed on three main reasons.

Intimacy

Intimacy isn't just what happens in the dark. It's also what happens at the sink on a days one to five. It’s playing a more active part in something so central to her womanhood. It’s knowing a little more about parts of her life and body that most husbands never think to pay attention to.

I can pick up one of those pads and read it the way a blood spatter analyst reads a crime scene. “We’ve got a ‘Day 2’ here.” That’s intimacy to me.

Care

I love the women in my life. There’s nothing I love more than being a husband and a girl dad. But there’s not much about being a woman that looks appealing to me.

Cleaning her pads seems like an act of kindness worth extending. It’s not because I think it makes me a good person. It’s because she deals with stuff I’ll never have to deal with, and it feels like a meaningful contribution to take this off her plate without her having to ask.

It’s not entirely selfless. Taking care of her in ways that matter to her matters to me. It’s a chance for me to be the husband I want to be rather than just talking about the husband I want to be.

Fun

We’ve been together a long time now. It’s easy to get stuck in a routine and become complacent, especially after losing a child. This is something that’s light-hearted and makes us laugh. It’s her telling me she’s left me another ‘soldier’ or me noticing a new one and acting as excited as if I’d found an unexpected twenty in an old jacket.

It’s a chance for me to remind her, by being silly, that I love doing it and will keep doing it. Yes we go on date nights, and yes I bring home flowers.

I also wash pads.

P.S. If this resonated with you, you can browse all past newsletters in the archive right here. And if you’re looking for all the ways to connect, find resources, and stay in touch, everything is gathered for you at here. I’ll keep it updated with what’s current.

My daughter Chloe died on February 1, 2023. We found out at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night. Our younger daughter was nearly eighteen at the time and was on an overnight school trip four hours north. We left at three in the morning to drive through the snow to pick her up before she found out the devastating news on social media.

During that drive, my wife turned to me and said, “This is the kind of thing that destroys marriages. We need to commit to each other right now that that’s not going to happen to us.”

We made that commitment. And I’m happy to say that our love for one another has grown even stronger over the past three years.

That’s not because it’s been easy. It’s the hardest thing we’ve ever been through and it’s far from over. But through it all, we’ve talked through everything. Most of the conversations have been loving and supportive. Some of them have been incredibly fucking hard. We’ve done our best to be honest with each other about what we’re experiencing. And the most important thing we’ve done is stay intentional about trying to understand what the other person is going through.

Near the end of 2023, my wife had the courage to address my abusing weed. Six months after Chloe’s death I couldn’t take the pain anymore and started self-medicating by smoking pot every day. I’d been alcohol free for about nine years at that point, but the legacy of addiction casts a long shadow.

She didn’t cast judgement or seek to punish me. She explained, in no uncertain terms, the impact it was having on her. She told me how painful it was watching me harm myself and how unsafe it made her feel to see her husband avoiding his pain again, rather than facing it.

It was really fucking hard to hear. It’s not because it wasn’t true. It’s because I knew it was true and that it was time for me to choose what happened next. I had to sit in the extreme discomfort of confronting the impact of my behaviour on the person who I love and need the most. I needed to hear what was true for her without trying to explain, rationalize or deny.

That last part can be a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. Grief is a uniquely personal experience, and it makes it easy to fill in the blanks about what your partner is thinking and feeling instead of asking. He doesn’t talk about it, so he must not care as much. She keeps crying, so she must be choosing to stay stuck. You stop trying to understand each other and start building a case against each other. Instead of a partner, she gets a judge and jury all to willing to condemn her.

Breaking that pattern requires something most men aren't taught to do. You have to want to understand her more than you want to be right about her

Curiosity Before Crisis

Most men don’t ask how their wives are doing often enough. It’s not because they don’t care. It’s because they’re operating under the mistaken assumption that no news is good news, and if something was really wrong, she’d say something.

They don’t ask, and the things that need to be said, remain unsaid.

You need to understand what’s actually happening. She’s tried to bring things up with you, and your reaction showed her that speaking up costs more than it’s worth. You might have shut down, gotten defensive, made it all about you or tried to fix it. She walked away feeling more like a problem than a person.

She didn’t get what she needed, and she reminded herself that being honest with you isn’t worth it. So the next time she had something to say, she didn’t say it. Instead of noticing, you convinced yourself that meant things are “good enough.”

That’s the difference between being proactive and reactive. The reactive man waits until the relationship blows up and then tries to fix it, usually making things worse in the process. The proactive man stays curious about what his wife is dealing with because he understands that what she needs more than anything is to feel seen and heard.

Curiosity isn’t a technique or a communication strategy you deploy to try to get something from her. It’s just giving enough of a shit about what’s going on inside her and asking about it before she has to bring it to you herself.

Being Willing to Hear It

Asking is only half of it. Being willing to hear what she has to say, even if it hurts, is the other half.

How you respond when she answers determines whether she answers honestly next time, or at all.

She tells you something true for her, something that took an emotional risk to say. You shut down, or explain yourself, or make it about your own pain, or try to fix it before she’s even finished. She didn’t get what she needed from you. Again. Each time it happens you’re showing her what to expect from you.

You don’t have to have a perfect response and you don’t have to fix anything. You need to hear what she’s saying without making her regret saying it. That means no defending, no explaining, and for the love of God, no fixing. A simple “I’d love to hear more about that” or “that sounds really hard,” followed by you shutting up and actually listening.

It’s not about being weak or passive. It’s about showing her you can hear something hard without making it about how hard it is for you to hear it. Every time you manage to do that, she gets a little more willing to tell you the truth next time. Every time you don’t, she pulls a little further back from you.

It compounds in both directions. You decide which direction every time she opens her mouth.

Curiosity needs a direction

Empathy is not a feeling you conjure up and hope she notices. It’s an action you take, the action is asking. Being curious about her experience means actually asking her about it, before things get bad enough that she has no choice but to tell you.

Most men don’t ask because they don’t know to ask in the first place. Even if they do, they don’t know what to ask or how to ask it. They’ll ask her to evaluate how well they’re doing rather than asking her to describe her experience. Open opens the door to connection and the other is a test she didn’t agree to take.

The most impactful questions help you both uncover and understand her experience rather than your performance. They give her a way to be open and vulnerable without the risk of having to pass a verdict on you. They make it easier to tell the truth because the truth isn’t about whether you’re failing her. It’s just about what’s going on inside her, and what she needs from you.

That’s what these questions are for.

The Questions

These aren’t designed to be delivered like you’re conducting an interview. They’re just questions worth having in your back pocket, for the moments you want to ask but don’t know what to say. Every one of them is about understanding her experience. None of them ask her to evaluate yours.

• What am I saying or doing when you feel most loved and supported by me?

• What’s something you wish I knew and understood about what this has been like for you?

• What’s something you’ve learned about yourself through this that you want me to know?

• What’s it like for you when you want to tell me something hard but aren’t sure how I’ll take it?

• When do you feel more alone in this journey than you want and need?

• When you’re hurting and you come to me, what do you most need from me in those moments?

• What is it like for you when you feel truly seen and heard by me, and when does that happen?

• When you think about where we are right now, what gives you hope about us?

• What would it mean to you to feel completely free to grieve exactly the way you need to around me?

• What’s the best way for me to bring up something with you that would make it easier for you to hear, and for you to know it’s coming from a place of love?

She hasn’t stopped having things to say. She wants you to ask her to say them.

So ask her. Then shut up and listen to what she tells you.

I wrote a survival guide for men in the days, weeks and months after a devastating loss. It’s completely free, no strings attached.

It’s just one guy doing my best to help other guys.

NOTE: This is how men tend to deal with any significant loss. This article happens to focus on the loss of a child.

I talked to a grieving father a few weeks ago and it was like talking to myself thirteen years ago.

He lost a child, which means his wife has lost one too. They’re both in hell, and they can’t reach each other at all. She’s trying, but he won’t let her. He can’t. The risk is too high.

“I can’t put this on her. She’s got enough to deal with without having to deal with my shit.” I’ve heard some version of that sentence from myself, and from too many other grieving men over the years.

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The Decision You Already Made

Here’s what that sentence actually means, even if it doesn’t feel this way when you say it.

It means you’ve already decided how your wife is doing and what she can handle. You concluded that what you’re going through doesn’t make the cut. You have no right to dump your weakness on her because you should be able to handle it yourself. So you clammed up, shut down and locked her out.

You did all of that without asking her. And now you’re stiff-arming her when she tries to get close and calling it love.

Not only did she not get a vote, she doesn’t even know you voted. Every time she reaches out she runs into a close door. She doesn’t know why you won’t open it and she’s started to wonder if it’s her. She’s grieving your child and losing you at the same time, and she has no idea what she’s done to deserve both.

You think you’re carrying the burden so she doesn’t have to. What you’re actually doing is adding to hers while avoiding your own.

The Rock Doesn’t Talk

The guy I spoke to wasn’t cold, indifferent or checked out. His love for his wife was obvious in how he spoke about her.

Like many of us, he’d grown up with a clear picture of what a man does when things get hard. You knuckle down, don’t complain, and get to work. You don’t fall apart in front of the people who depend on you, because the moment you do, you’ve failed them. You’ve added to their pain instead of protecting them from it. That’s a failure so intolerable it must be avoided at all costs.

So he went back to work and worked longer and harder than he had before. He handled logistics, fixed what could be fixed and tried too damn hard to fix what couldn’t. If he didn’t look too hard, he could pretend he was managing.

His wife saw something very different. She saw a guy who answered every question with “I’m fine.” A guy who’d barely shed a tear since their child died. And a guy who left the room whenever the conversation got anywhere near anything real.

She’d started to tell herself he didn’t care. They’d lost their kid and it didn’t seem to faze him at all. What the hell is wrong with him? This is the guy I married? Even when he’s physically present he’s completely gone.

She wasn’t trying to lean on him. She was trying to grieve with him. Those are different things, and he was too stuck in a broken version of masculinity to see the difference.

What You’re Actually Protecting

When you tell yourself you’re keeping your pain from her to protect her, you’re telling yourself a story. It’s time you took a hard look at it.

She doesn’t need you to protect her right now. She needs you to love her, and here’s what that requires. It requires learning what she needs, which means asking her. It requires letting her tell you that she doesn’t need you to be a rock, she needs you to be a person, and then sitting with that idea instead of filing it away and sprinting back to what feels familiar.

Instead, you’re taking the path of least resistance. You’ve decided what she needs and decided you can’t provide it. You’ve slammed the door and built a reason it has to stay shut. It’s a reason that sounds selfless, which is why it works so well and is so hard to change. When you believe the story you can tell yourself you’re doing the right thing.

But the door isn’t protecting her. The door is protecting you.

You don’t have to feel what you’d feel if you opened it. You don’t have to stand there while she cries with no way to fix it. You don’t have to be a man who lost a child and doesn’t know how to handle the pain. You don’t have to risk her seeing that you’re wrecked. Of course you keep her locked out. And you get to tell yourself you’re doing it all for her sake.

That’s the story. And it’s costing her more than your grief ever would.

What I Told Him

His wife wasn’t asking him to fix something they both knew couldn’t be fixed. She wasn’t looking for answers or his version of strength. She was looking for the man she married to be honest that he was feeling some version of what she was feeling. That’s it. She wanted to know she didn’t have to get through the loss of their child on her own.

He was so busy protecting her from his pain that he’d left her completely alone in hers.

He hadn’t thought of it that way. Neither did I, for a long time.

Grief doesn’t make men this way. We already know how to lock down when what we’re feeling gets too uncomfortable, too unpredictable, too likely to get in the way. Loss just gives us a very good reason to throw away the key.

It’s Going to Feel Terrible

People have been telling men that we should “let people in” forever. You’ve heard it yourself. Here’s the part no one tells you.

It’s going to feel terrible. Not just uncomfortable, actually terrible. You’re going to sit down with her and try to say something real and every instinct you have is going to tell you to stop, that she can’t handle this, that you’re making it worse.

You might start bawling and the voice in your head is going to be screaming at you that you’re weak and pathetic. It’ll convince a part of you that the man you were raised to be would never do this.

It might be one of the most terrifying things you ever done. Do it anyway. The man you were raised to be wouldn’t cower in the face of fear. He’d square his shoulders, stiffen his spine and walk toward it. That’s what courage looks like and courage is exactly what this is going to take.

These are the moments that make men, and save relationships.

Your wife isn’t asking you to have it together. She's asking you to stop pretending that you do.

I don't know if the guy I talked to will find his way back to his wife. I hope he does. She deserves a vote on how this goes. So does yours

When my wife Cindy died, I thought grief was for weak people. The weak can lie on the couch and cry because the strong are busy taking care of the things they can’t.

So, instead of grieving, I put it behind me. I got on with the business of building a new life. I moved to a new town, started a new job, and remarried. I seemed functional as hell and people often remarked on my strength.

I was also drinking every single day. Heavily. I was lying about, embarrassing myself and hating myself because I felt too pathetic to stop. What I couldn’t see, not for a single day of those four and a half years, was what the drinking was actually for.

When I finally hit bottom and stopped, nothing changed. I got sober and waited. Four or five months later, something I wasn't expecting started to happen. I started visiting her grave more often. I wrote about her. I felt the intense pain of sadness, regret and loss. I thought I was losing my mind. It turned out I was grieving her death had started healing. After five long years.

And here’s the thing I still find incredible: the entire time I was drinking, it never once occurred to me that I was drinking to avoid that pain. Not a single time. I was making that choice every single day, and every single day it made perfect sense. Not because I was weak. Because I had no idea I was avoiding anything at all.

That's what your psychological protection system does. It doesn't feel like protection. It feels like the only reasonable option.

That's not a drinking story. That's a protection story. And once I understood what had been driving it, I started seeing it in men everywhere. Men who were still functional, still holding things together, still telling everyone they were fine, doing what made complete sense to them every single day, with no more awareness of what was underneath it than I'd had.

That's exactly what I built Leading Through Loss to address.

There’s a particular kind of man who finds his way to this work.

He’s still functional. He’s still holding things together. From the outside he looks like someone who handled it. He went to the funeral, kept his job, and didn’t fall apart in the ways that would concern people. He’s still providing, still showing up to the things he’s supposed to show up to, and still keeping the machinery of his life running.

But he’s not engaged the way he used to be. The people closest to him can feel it and some of them have said so. He can feel it too. He’s present in the room and absent from the conversations that matter most. He’s doing the things a good man is supposed to do and feeling nothing while he does them. And no matter what he tells himself, no matter what the people who love him say, he can’t seem to find his way back.

He's not looking for permission to fall apart. He's tried harder than anyone knows. What he's looking for is the reasons why he can't get back into his own life. He’s looking to make sense of what's been happening to him.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then.

The pulling back, the checking out, the performance of fine, none of it was weakness and none of it was random. It was a system. A protection system that was running long before the loss and got turned all the way up by it. And you can’t push through a protection system on willpower, because it was built specifically to survive that.

What you can do is see it clearly. All of it, in your own words, on a page in front of you. Where it came from, what it’s been protecting, and what it’s been costing you.

That’s what Phase 1 does. It doesn’t fix anything. It makes the invisible visible. And for a man who has spent months or years not being able to explain what’s been happening to him, that turns out to be the only thing that actually feels like progress.

I’m launching Leading Through Loss today.

Phase 1 is a guided, self-paced process that takes less than two hours. No calls, no scheduling, and no performing for anyone. You work through it on your own time, in your own space, and you walk away knowing, maybe for the first time, exactly what’s been driving your behavior since the loss and why you haven’t been able to stop it.

It’s $199.

Phase 2 opens to Phase 1 graduates only. That’s where the work of actually dismantling what Phase 1 identified begins. You can’t get there without this.

If you’ve been reading this and recognizing yourself, I built this for you.

Start Leading Through Loss

You’re showing up to everything and have been for as long as you can remember. You’re handling your responsibilities and from the outside you seem to be holding things together. Locking your toughest feelings down is the only way you’re able to function. People are probably telling you how strong you are. What you’re doing isn’t strength and I’m going to show you what it’s costing you.

The alarm clock goes off at zero dark thirty. You open your eyes and, if you’re lucky, might even have a few seconds of peace before you remember that someone you love is dead. You push the thoughts aside because there’s no time to wallow in the shit.

You get your ass up, do what needs to be done, wonder how you survived another day, and go to bed. The bills are getting paid, there’s food on the table. You sat through the meetings and went to the games after work. From the outside, you’re functioning. Things are different on the inside.

You’re watching yourself go through the motions like you’re watching a stranger. You don’t know when the gap opened up between what you’re doing and what you’re feeling. You just know it’s there, and it’s getting wider. Nobody seems to notice because your performance is too damn good.

It’s not just what you’re producing. It’s the role you’re playing.

None of it is an accident. You’ve been rehearsing it your whole life.

The Contract You Didn’t Sign

There’s a set of rules most men absorb so early, and so often, they can’t remember learning them. Don’t rely on anyone else. Man up and handle your shit. Be the rock that other people can count on. Don’t let anyone see how bad things actually are. And don’t you ever fall apart.

You didn’t choose the rules. They were handed to you in a million tiny moments. You watched how your dad handled hard things. You remember what was praised and what was punished. Every moment someone said “man up” or “be strong” or looked relieved when you lied and said you were fine taught you a lesson. You were a good boy, so you carried those lessons forward.

When your person died, these rules were already burned into your operating system. When you faced the hardest thing you’d ever faced, you kept showing up. You didn’t do it because you were okay or had made peace with any of it. You did it because showing up is what the contract required. Breaking it wasn’t an option, so you destroyed yourself to fulfill it.

The Rules Own You

You’re not fine. You’re not handling it as well as everyone thinks. If you’re being honest with yourself, the brutal feelings are all there, no matter what you do. You can’t lock down the sadness, the guilt, and the dread that shows up at night when the house goes quiet and there’s nothing left to do.

You feel them all. You just don’t have anywhere to put them that doesn’t feel like a violation of the contract. Out of desperation, you convert them into something you can manage. You take on more work and stay busy. When you have downtime, you find something else to do so you can push the feelings down far enough that they don’t feel like they’re tearing you apart. And you repeat the cycle, day after day.

Most people can’t see through it. The people around you think you’re coping. Some of them probably tell you how well you’re handling it. You know what they’re not seeing, but you nod your head and say “Thanks” anyway. You’re an imposter and you know it. The people who know you best see something different. They just don’t know how to reach you through it.

You can only keep this up for so long. Running toward work means running from what you need to face. You run flat out, and when you hit the wall, you don’t see it coming. You’re just moving and then you’re on the ground with no idea what happened.

What’s Keeping You Functional is Costing You Everything

When you don’t have a road map for a loss like this, you fall back on the only thing you know, whether it works or not. At least it’s familiar, and there’s so much chaos in your head right now that familiar feels like a lifeline. So you keep moving and find ways to be useful.

You know you’re barely hanging on. You can’t let yourself stop and fully feel the pain of what you’ve lost, because you’re terrified of falling into a pit and never getting out. That would mean failing the people who didn’t die like you failed the person who did.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s an understandable response to an incomprehensible situation, given the tools you had. The rules kept you functional when functional was what the people around you needed.

But there’s a cost that doesn’t show up right away. It shows up later, in the people who give up on you because they don’t know how to reach you and don’t have the energy to keep trying. It shows up in the distance between you and your kids that you can see clearly but can’t slow down enough to close. And it shows up in knowing you’re fucking up your life but feeling like you can’t stop.

They’re Not Fine Either

Your partner, if they’re still here, is carrying more than their share of the load. They’re dealing with their own loss and now they’re alone. They’re not spending the precious few mental and emotional cycles they have left on healing. They’re spending them on trying to connect with someone who’s too afraid to slow down. They want their husband and find an actor instead, and it hurts like hell every time you shut them down. After enough of that, they’ll stop trying.

Your kids are watching too. They’re always watching. Your son is learning how to man up when things get hard. Your daughter is learning what men do when things fall apart. It’s what she’ll expect and tolerate from her man. They won’t even know they’ve learned these lessons. It’ll be the rules they follow, just like you’re following the ones that were handed to you.

The performance feels like protection for you. For them, it’s just distance from their dad.

What You Can’t Perform Your Way Through

Your physical presence doesn’t mean much when your mind is obsessed with the next thing you need to do to keep the pain at bay. They don’t need much from you. They need to feel like you’re actually there when you’re standing in front of them.

Performing kept you functional when your loss tried to crush you. It bought you time. But time has a way of running out without announcing itself. Before you know it, you’ve lost the people who matter most. Your health starts to go. You’ve gotten so good at not looking at what’s wrong that you can’t find it when you decided to try.

You’re not broken. The performance isn’t proof that something’s wrong with you. It’s proof that you learned to survive under impossible conditions using the tools you had. But the tools that kept you standing were built for a different job. And you already know they’re not equal to this one.

You’ve been holding the line for a long time. The question isn’t whether you can keep holding it. You’ve already proved you can. The question is what it’s costing you, and whether the people on the other side of that line are getting the man they actually need.

The rules that have been running your life before you lost them didn’t show up because of the loss. The loss just turned them all the way up.

There’s a structured process built specifically for men like you that produces a complete map of exactly what’s been keeping you stuck, and why willpower and staying busy haven’t touched it. It’s not therapy or a group program. Just a clear picture of the system you’ve been living inside, so you can finally stop wondering what’s wrong with you and start seeing what’s actually in the way.

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There’s a massive, solidified mass of material in the basement beneath Reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl. It resembled tree bark and glass when workers first found it. It’s made of corium, the highly radioactive material produced when a nuclear core melts down. It’s a grotesque, wrinkled formation that workers eventually nicknamed the Elephant’s Foot.

When scientists finally entered the corridor beneath the reactor eight months after the disaster, sensors showed the formation was so radioactive it would take only five minutes for a person to receive a lethal dose of radiation.

I touched my own version of the Elephant’s Foot yesterday and survived to tell the tale.

Naivete or Hubris (or Both)

My daughters were five and six when their mom, my first wife, took her own life. Sitting them down and telling them their mother was dead is one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I’ve replayed that moment in my head endlessly over the years.

I believed so many things that turned out to be wrong. I thought if I just loved them enough they’d heal from the loss of their mother. I thought that if she had to die, it was better that it happened when they were young. I didn’t send them to a counsellor or therapist because I thought rebuilding a stable, loving family would be enough. I didn’t understand the impact of that kind of trauma on a young soul and didn’t bother to educate myself.

Thirteen years later, our oldest daughter died, after dealing with the same kinds of mental health issues as her mother.

In the three years since her death, I’ve replayed every decision I ever made, wondering what I could have done differently and whether it would have made any difference if I had.

At the same time, I’ve never allowed myself to dwell in the what-ifs and if-onlys. I refused to wade into the hell I’ve seen torture so many other grieving parents. When my mind goes there, I always soothe myself by repeating, “Being a great dad is and was the most important thing in the world to me. I did my damn best.”

Logically, both of those things are true. I even believed what I was telling myself. I was always open to the idea that I might have unresolved guilt I needed to work through. But I thought it unlikely because I’d already made sense of it.

It Turned Out to Be Horseshit

About a month ago, in an agonizing therapy session, I realized that was all a steaming pile of horseshit. I wrote about it here:

It turns out there’s a radioactive core of guilt eating me alive under the surface. I’d been unaware of it for at least three years and quite possibly sixteen. That’s quite a thing to reckon with, especially for a guy who’s read at least eight percent of ninety percent of every personal development book ever written. I thought I’d navel-gazed my way into a finely-tuned state of self-awareness.

Blind spot, thy name is Jason.

In the month since uncovering how full of shit I’ve been, I’ve been experiencing intense anger. Not the lash-out-and-hurt-people kind. The brooding, internal, hate-filled inner dialogue kind. It’s unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and I haven’t been able to make it stop. It absolutely sucks.

At least it’s not unexpected. My therapist has been clear that things will get harder before they get easier. That’s just how approaching the core wound works. Great.

The Core, Exposed

Regular readers will know that I’ve been doing Somatic Experiencing therapy for about a year and a half. I won’t go into it in this post other than to say it’s been life-changing.

Yesterday, during my session, I sat there connecting with what was happening in my body and hating every fucking second of it. The longer I sat there, the more uncomfortable I became. Often the discomfort passes quickly. Yesterday it only got more intense.

After about five minutes I threw up my hands and said, “I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore right now.” He asked me what emotions I was feeling and I said I was tired. Tired of having to do this work. Tired of it being so fucking hard. Tired of all of it.

Then I had a powerful insight and started to cry.

“You know man, that’s not what I’m tired of. I’m tired of Chloe being dead. I’m tired of missing her. I’m just tired of her not being here anymore.”

Somehow that led me back to the decisions I made after Cindy died all those years ago. The decision not to get my kids professional help probably contributed to Chloe’s death all those years later.

My soul got held up in front of me like incontrovertible evidence of my failure. The thought that screamed in my face was, “HOW COULD YOU HAVE BEEN SO FUCKING STUPID???”

And there it was. I’d finally peeled enough layers back to get to the core. My connection to it only lasted ten seconds before it was gone, wrapped up in its protective sarcophagus once again. But I’d faced it. I’d touched it. And I know I can do it again.

When I explained this to my therapist, he said, “You touched it and survived.” I started crying again, harder than before.

Through those tears, I found myself looking back at that young dad. He was doing everything he could to keep himself afloat. He’d raised his girls through five years of watching mental illness consume his wife and their mom. It had all taken a massive toll on him. Now he was facing life after suicide with no idea what to do next.

I felt something I’ve never felt before. It only lasted a few seconds, but I felt compassion for that guy. For me. And it was beautiful.

As the session wound down, one last thing became clear. All my rationalization and logic about doing my best had been a protection mechanism, running efficiently in the background without me ever knowing it. How could I have seen it when I didn’t realize there was anything I needed to protect myself from?

The scientists who’ve studied the Elephant’s Foot in the years after the disaster have noticed something interesting. The radioactivity is diminishing. It’s not gone and it’s certainly not safe. But it’s far less lethal than it was in those first months when five minutes meant a death sentence. Time and exposure had changed the equation.

I don’t know how many more times I’ll have to go back into that corridor. I don’t know how long it takes before the thing that’s been eating me alive from the inside loses some of its power. But I went in yesterday and came back out. That’s something I didn’t know I could do.

It felt kind.

What I found yesterday is another protection system that predates the loss. The loss just turned it all the way up.

There’s a structured process for mapping exactly that, built specifically for men who are stuck after loss and can’t find the thing that’s keeping them there on their own.

It’s not therapy or a group. It’s clarity so you can see how you’re protecting yourself and why it’s making moving forward so damn hard.

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The shine has gone off everything that mattered to you. If you didn’t already hate your job, it’s hard not to hate it now. You find yourself staring at the wall a hell of a lot more than doing the hobbies you used to enjoy. Making plans? Forget about it. There’s no point in planning something for tomorrow when it will suck just as much as today.

You go through the motions like a wind-up toy, but the reason to go through them is gone. It’s not weakness and it’s not necessarily depression. It’s what loss actually does to a man, and most men never get a clear explanation of why it happens.

Why Nothing Feels Worth Doing

Something was influencing everything you did every day, and you never had to think about it because it never stopped working. Until it did.

Every bond you form with someone gets wired into your brain. You anticipate seeing them at certain times. The annoying little things they did had become part of your shared routines. You’d think about them and even if they weren’t home you’d usually know where they were. All the moments you shared with them built a set of predictions your brain kept in the background, without you ever having to manage them.

The reason you looked forward to seeing them, the reason the routines felt comfortable rather than just repetitive, was your brain’s reward system doing its job. It’s connected to everything that gives your life a sense of direction and meaning. It was built around that person in ways you never had to notice because you never had to look.

Then they’re gone, but the predictions don’t stop. The brain keeps expecting what it was built to expect, and every time it reaches for something that isn’t there, it comes back empty. So it keeps reaching, and it keeps coming back empty, and after a while everything starts to feel that way. Absolutely fucking empty.

That’s what’s going on when nothing feels worth doing. Your job, your hobbies and your life are all still there, waiting for you to jump back in. The part of you that told you those things were worth getting up for is wrapped around a person who isn’t here anymore.

You might be telling yourself you’re pathetic and weak because that’s exactly how you feel. The people around you might be telling you that you’re checked out. Neither of those are true. Something that was making things feel worth doing is gone and you’re feeling that absence in everything.

You Lost More than a Person

Most men don’t understand how much of their identity was tied to who they were in relation to the person they lost. You might have been their father, husband or son. They were a person you showed up for. Those aren’t just descriptions. They’re the answer to a question you never had to ask yourself. You knew who you were without having to think about it. Now you do, and it sucks.

When someone like that dies, you’re not just grieving their loss. You’re grieving who you were when they were alive. The map you were using to navigate your own life had them on it as a fixed point. Now there’s no fixed point and no way to orient yourself.

Studies have looked at this, but you don’t need a study to know it. Try to answer a few simple questions right now: who are you, what do you want, what gets you out of bed in the morning? You used to know. Now you’re not so sure. It’s not because you’re falling apart. It’s because the answers you used to have were built around someone who isn’t here anymore, and nobody told you what was going to happen.

What Shutting Down Actually Is

Here’s what nobody tells you about withdrawing, checking out, locking yourself in the basement, or whatever you want to call it.

You stopped calling people back. You show up to things but you’re not really there. You don’t talk about them. It’s not because you don’t think about them. You spend most of your days thinking about them. It’s because opening that door means you might fall apart in front of someone else. That’s a risk you’re not willing to take.

It’s not failure. It’s a protection system.

A devastating loss can’t be fixed. You’ve already figured out that it won’t respond to effort, willpower or grinding harder. You’re still trying because it’s all you know how to do. In the meantime, you’ve locked yourself down. The stoicism that everyone around you has probably praised you for isn’t strength in the traditional sense. It’s the system doing what it was designed to do when the pain gets big enough: limit exposure.

The problem is that the protection that got you through the worst of it never got the signal to stand down. It’s two years, or more, later and you’re still protecting yourself by locking yourself in the same prison. You’re not feeling things deeply because somewhere along the way the system decided that feeling things deeply cost too much.

Life has already shown you that love makes loss hurt a hell of a lot more. Caring about something has proven to be a liability. The numbness isn’t something that happened to you. It’s something your own system is doing for you. It’s built to keep pain out, and it’s doing that job so well it’s keeping everything else out too.

That’s why deciding to feel better doesn’t work on its own. Your system will always respond to evidence over a decision. And until something shows it that the emergency is over, it keeps doing its job.

Most men don’t talk about any of this. Their silence makes it worse, because the connection that would actually give your brain something new to work with never happens. So the walls stay up, and the longer they stay up, the more normal it feels to live behind them.

The people around you who didn’t die can feel it, whether they’re calling you out or not. You can feel it too. The guy who used to give a shit about things is somewhere else. The longer your protection system runs unchecked, the harder it gets to find your way back.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I feel numb and empty after losing someone I loved?

The part of your brain that made things feel worth doing was built around that person, and when they died it lost the thing it was running on. The numbness you’re feeling might be grief, it might be depression, or it might be both at once. It’s not weakness, and it’s not you falling apart. It’s your brain reaching for something that isn’t there anymore, over and over, and coming back empty every time.

Why don’t I care about my work or hobbies anymore?

Caring about those things was tied to them in ways you never had to think about until now. They weren’t just someone you loved. They were part of what made your daily life make sense. When they’re gone, the things you used to care about lose their pull, and no amount of telling yourself to snap out of it changes that.

Why is it so hard to talk about any of this?

Because showing that you’re struggling carries a cost that doesn’t feel worth paying. You might fall apart in front of someone. You might make things harder for the people around you who are already hurting. The walls you’ve built aren’t indifference. They’re protection, and they’re keeping out the connection that would actually help.

Is it normal to still feel this stuck years later?

Yes, and not because something’s wrong with you. The protection system that got you through the worst of it never got the signal that it’s safe to stand down. It’ll keep doing its job until something gives it a reason to stop.

You’re Not the Man You Were. You’re Not Gone Either.

Going through the motions and not giving a shit about things you used to care about doesn’t mean you’re broken. It means something happened to you that was big enough to trigger every protection mechanism you had, and those mechanisms aren’t built for living. They’re built for getting through the day. You’ve been getting through the days, and that’s not nothing. But you already know it’s not enough.

The man you used to be isn’t buried with the person who died. He’s behind the wall the system built. That’s a different problem, and different problems have different solutions.

If you recognized yourself, or someone you love, in this article, there’s a reason.

I’m building a program called Leading Through Loss. It’s structured work for men who are stuck after loss and know something is still in there but can’t find it on their own. Not therapy. Not a group. It’s a map of how you’re protecting yourself and someone to help you read it.

I’m opening it soon. If you want to know when:

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Grief is the remarkably complex process of adapting to an important loss. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the aftermath of my wife and daughter’s deaths, it’s that there’s always another layer of the onion to peel back. It’s as exhausting as it is enlightening.

What I Thought I’d Resolved

The stark truth about both of their deaths is that I couldn’t save either of them. I was the main man in their lives and I was sworn to protect them. I did everything I knew how to do and they’re both dead. That’s a damn tough pill to swallow. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be gagging on it for the rest of my life.

Guilt is a familiar bedfellow to anyone who’s lost someone they love. You tell yourself that if only you’d been a better, smarter or more loving person they’d still be alive. It’s an all-too-easy trap that keeps the griever chained to a past they can never change.

I’ve had moments of crushing guilt since Chloe died. How could I not have seen how much her mental health had deteriorated? Why was it so hard for me to listen to my wife when she was telling me there was something very wrong? What made me believe so many of the lies she told me?

At the same time, being a great dad was, and is, the most important thing in the world to me. I know I did the best I could to be there for my kids. I tried my best to create the kind of relationship with them where they would feel safe coming to me if their world felt like it was crashing down.

It didn’t happen with Chloe.

I’ve thought and talked about all that in excruciating detail. I’ve written about it, talked to my wife about it and made it the focus of quite a few sessions with therapists. In the three years since Chloe died, I’ve gotten to a good place and released most of the guilt I was carrying.

Then last weekend happened. The fucking onion must be peeled.

The Message

I have a complicated relationship with my younger brother. I won’t bore you with all the details here but suffice it to say we’re very different people. Until last weekend, he hadn’t mentioned Chloe a single time to me. Literally not one word.

I asked him about it last year. I was curious about what kind of thought process would lead someone not to check in on his brother after his daughter’s death. I sent him a carefully worded message about it. I wrote in a way to minimize the chances of him getting defensive.

He responded with, “If you needed something from me you could have asked.” Ok then.

Then out of the blue, he sent me this message:

I was surprised he messaged me, but I was astonished by my reaction. I felt like a grenade went off in my chest. I’m not an angry or violent person at all and I wanted to put my fist through a fucking wall.

It took everything in me to send him a semi-coherent response. This is where we left it:

I couldn’t calm down for almost four hours. My body was vibrating with tension and explosive with pressure. I wanted to tear my own skin off just to change my fucking state. My wife had to talk me off the ledge and I’m grateful she’s always by my side.

Navel Gazing

At the same time, my eighteen months of Somatic Experiencing therapy has given me the capacity to be much more present with what I’m experiencing — regardless of how uncomfortable it is. In the midst of the extreme discomfort I was experiencing, I was able to be curious about what was happening. I found it fascinating and wanted to explore it further. What was this about?

The first thing that came to mind was that maybe I did still feel guilty. It seemed like a likely culprit considering the substance of his message and the reaction I was having. I’ve always been open to the idea that guilt still lingers under the surface but was reasonably confident that I’d resolved most of it.

I figured it was also anger at my brother. He has the emotional development of a box of hair and here he is, deigning to impart his unearned opinion on what I should or should not be feeling? Fuck you. Where were you for the last three years? Or the many years prior to Chloe’s death?

I also knew that in his own socially awkward way, this was a bid for connection. He was trying to help me.

That made things more complicated. I felt some level of guilt for having no interest at all in turning toward this bid. Rebuffing this offer of “kindness” feels in conflict with my values in some way. I try to be a kind, compassionate and empathetic person. But I had zero confidence that if I had this conversation with him I wouldn’t completely lose my shit on him. I pictured him explaining his screwed up, full-of-holes reasoning and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from unleashing all the hurtful, judgmental things I think about him. Not trusting my ability to control myself is unsettling.

Lastly, there’s grief that this is what my relationship with my brother has become. We used to be quite close but our lives have gone in very different trajectories. I don’t see any chance of things ever being different. I’m usually able to accept that but this brought any lingering pain right to the surface.

Walking into the Darkness

A few days later I had an appointment with my therapist. I was looking forward to bringing this up with him. As I did, I found myself getting worked up all over again.

He listened to me and when I was done he said, “A reaction like that to someone else is usually about something that’s unresolved in ourselves.” I figured he’d say something like that and I was looking forward to unpacking it with him. As much as one can look forward to discovering more ways he’s screwed up.

Then he said something that was a punch in the gut. “You show me clearly in every single session that you have a tremendous amount of unresolved guilt about Cindy and Chloe’s deaths. I’ve been waiting for the right time to bring it up and this feels like that time.”

Fuck you, onion.

He started telling me about Carl Jung and shadow work. He explained how much of his own work he’d done and how disturbing and terrifying it can be. He also made clear that understanding and integrating is the path to peace, healing and joy.

Let’s go, therapist man. I’m here for it.

He asked me to imagine having that conversation with my brother. He told me to place my brother at a distance in my mind that felt safe to me. I started with him on the couch, across from me in our living room. That was way too close so I banished him to my back door. Too close. How about the back yard? He ended up all the way across the yard in my mind’s eye.

He encouraged me, as he always does, to stay present with what was happening in my body. What happened next started to feel like a mushroom trip. My brother doesn’t look well in real life. In my mind, in that moment, all his features became exaggerated to the point where he looked like a menacing, evil clown.

And somehow, I had the awareness that I was looking at myself.

What happened next shocked me. A volcanic sense of hatred welled up inside me. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life. It was dark and vicious to the point where I scared the shit out of myself. My face was contorted in rage. I wanted to strangle my brother — myself. Somehow, I knew he represented me. What the fuck?

We debriefed the experience and I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. I was emotionally and physically spent. I stumbled upstairs and told my wonderful wife that I needed to lock myself in the dark basement by myself for the rest of the night. Thankfully, I was too tired to be disturbed.

The Gift

It’s been a week since that session and our next one is in a week. I’ve felt quite a sense of calm and peace this week. It’s not clear to me how or if it’s related to the work I began last week. What I do find surprising is that I haven’t been able to connect back to that sense of hate at all in the last week. I find it so interesting that there’s something so dark and important within me and my logical mind can’t find it.

As I grow and heal, I’m learning the limits of my logical mind and I’m a more whole person because of it.

When I’ve shared the message from my brother with people, the most common reaction is something like, “What an awful thing to say.” I don’t see it that way at all. He gave me a huge gift, perhaps inadvertently. His message led me to a door that I need to walk through to continue healing. It came to me at the right time and in the right way to allow me to see it clearly.

Three years ago I couldn’t have had that therapy session. I wouldn’t have been able to stay in the room with what came up. The therapy, the writing, the willingness to keep looking has built the capacity to be present with something that dark without running from it.

This is what healing actually looks like. it’s not the absence of pain. Pain will always be a part of our human experience. It’s building enough of ourselves back up so that when the next layer appears, we’re able to square our shoulders, stiffen our spine and face it.

Whatever’s next, I’m here for it. I can do it and so can you.

The onion waiting to be peeled. Healing demands we do.

If you recognized something in this story, there’s a reason.

I’m building a program called Leading Through Loss. It’s structured work for men who are stuck after loss and know something is still in there but can’t find it on their own. Not therapy. Not a group. It’s a map of how you’re protecting yourself and someone to help you read it.

I’m opening it soon. If you want to know when:

Notify Me When It's Ready

You’re sitting at a table in a room dimly lit by a single lamp. It’s close to midnight and everyone’s long since gone to bed. You’ve just finished your fourth double and you’re praying for sleep. In other words, it’s a night like any other.

The calendar on the wall reminds you of what you already know. The third anniversary of your son’s death is bearing down on you. Again. You didn’t know it was possible to miss someone this much.

You’ll put your fist through a fucking wall if one more person tells you that you “need to move on.” How can you get on with your life when the person you were sworn to protect is permanently locked in the past. You failed them once. Leaving them behind means failing them all over again.

That’s never going to happen on your watch. So you pour another drink in the name of honouring your boy and hate yourself for doing it.

You’re not broken, weak or failing at grief. You’re loyal, and loyal and lost can look exactly the same.

What Nobody Tells You

The loyalty isn’t a conscious decision you’re making. It’s one of the by-products of the operating system that’s been guiding your life like an invisible hand. The loss didn’t create it but it did supercharge it and it’s been running that way ever since.

You don’t bond with people you care about by talking about your feelings. You do the things that need to get done. You show up for them when things are hard. Your bonds with them get wired into you at a biological level. It’s that deep.

Here’s a term you can forget about as soon as you read it: vasopressin bonding. It’s driven by a hormone that activates during shared stress and challenge. Every time you faced something hard together, or for them, it made a deposit that told you this person was more than just loved. They’re essential like safety and oxygen are essential.

Their death doesn’t make the wiring disappear. You keep looking for what your program tells you is necessary and you keep coming up empty. It’s like waking up every day and remembering you’re missing an arm.

It hurts like hell every time it happens.

The grief isn’t just emotional. It’s neurological and the protection system that formed around it isn’t weakness. It’s your brain trying to hold onto something it spent years learning it couldn’t function without.

It’s not a conscious decision when your protection system kicks in. It’s automatic and unseen. It’s a set of rules your mind assembled without asking you. You’ve got rules about what you’re allowed to feel, what moving forward means and what kind of man you are.

These rules feel like love and function like a cage.

And now the system that was built to protect the bond is protecting the grief instead. It keeps you frozen at your post. You’re numb, checked out, and feel guilty when you don’t feel like shit.

That’s not weakness, even though it feels exactly like it. It’s your protection system doing its job.

The problem is it never got the memo that the emergency is over.

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The Decision You Don’t Remember Making

When you lost them, something in you made a decision. It wasn’t a conscious decision you sat down and thought through. It’s more like a system update that happened in the background while you were busy trying to stay standing.

The decision might have sounded something like, “As long as I’m not okay, they’re still real.” Sometimes it goes like, “My pain is evidence of how much I love them.”

I can remember thinking, “I hope if she’s looking down, she sees how much I’m hurting so she knows I will always love her.”

Grief changed from a natural process that follows a loss to evidence that what you had mattered. It became proof that you’re not the kind of man who just moves on and replaces or forgets people. You’re still honouring them as you’re still bearing the crushing weight of the cross you’re carrying.

When they died, you drove a flag in the ground. And you made an unconscious promise to stand guard over it. You've been at your post ever since, faithful and exhausted. Moving forward feels like moving away. And that feels like betraying them and betraying the man you need to be.

You’re still doing what needs to be done. You’re going to work, paying the bills and showing up the best you can. You’ve been standing guard at the flag ever since. You’re not doing it because anyone asked you to and at some rational level you know it’s not helping anyone. But leaving your post feels like the worst thing a man like you could do.

You call it tired, stressed or going through the motions. Your family calls it checked out, isolating or even addiction.

What it actually is, under the surface is loyalty. Fierce, costly, completely unconscious loyalty to the person you lost and to the man you were when they were alive.

How it Keeps You Stuck

The protection system running underneath all of this isn’t invisible if you know what to look for. It shows up in four specific ways.

It keeps you from fully engaging in your life. It’s not that you don’t want to. You might want it more than anything. But every time you start to care about something, the system pulls you back. It’s like the Death Star’s tractor beam in Star Wars. You can’t see it but you can’t break free from it either. You know what used to matter but you just can’t seem to get there. So you stay checked out and keep going through the motions.

Your system is protecting you from having to answer a question that feels unanswerable: who am I without them? Their death didn’t just take them from you, it took the version of you that only existed in relation to them. Father of. Husband of. The man she believed in. The man his kid needed in a specific, irreplaceable way. The system keeps you frozen partly because moving forward means stepping into that question without an answer. That void is the most terrifying thing you’ve ever faced.

It makes guilt the price of every good day. Your system has a hard and fast rule that feeling ok means forgetting. Every moment of pleasure sets off an alarm. Even not feeling like shit for a few minutes can trigger it. The guilt isn’t irrational. It’s the system enforcing its own logic. It’s making sure you’re still paying what’s owed so it keeps the accounts balanced.

It turns the pain into evidence.There’s a belief underneath all of this that convinces men the depth of their grief is proof of the depth of their love. Which means if the grief eases up, the evidence starts to disappear. The system protects that evidence like a lion protects his pride. If the pain fades it means your love will fade with it. What does that say about the love you had for them? Your protection system will never let you find out.

It turns the loss into your identity. You’re the man who will carry it forever and honour what you’ve lost by staying broken in it. Those stories you tell yourself about yourself have a vital job. They keep you from becoming someone you can’t respect. You’d rather die than become the guy who moved on too fast and loved too little.

The trap isn’t the grief. The trap is what the grief has become.

Somewhere along the way, without you noticing, the mourning stopped being something you were doing and became something you were being. It stopped being a response to the loss and started being your entire operating system.

Here’s what I want you to see: honouring someone and standing guard at their memory are two different things. The flag was never the problem. The trap is confusing the flag with the mission. You’re guarding something that doesn’t need guarding from people who aren’t threatening it. And the cost of that guard duty is your life.

The flag you planted was an act of love. Staying at the post is an act of self-hatred.

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Knowing Isn’t the Same as Free

The person you lost would not want this for you. You know that, brother. People have said it to you and you’ve said it to yourself. And then you poured another drink to make it all go away. It never does though, does it? It never fucking does.

Knowing it and being free of it are two completely different things.

Knowing it is information. Being free of it requires you to understand what’s actually forcing you to stay at your post. It’s the long-standing beliefs your system telling you how to deal with this loss. You’re in an abusive relationship with them. They whisper that they know what’s best for you while they’re sticking a shank in your side.

Most men never see those beliefs clearly and so never question them. They just feel the weight of them and assume that’s grief. Or that they’re pathetic. That’s just how it is and it’s who I am now.

Hear me now.That’s complete and utter bullshit and you need to see it for what it is.

You can’t feel your way out of your protection system. The system isn’t running on emotions. It’s running on assumptions that you’re not aware of and so never bothered to question. You can’t willpower your way through them. If you could have you would have done it already. You can’t wait them out or hope they go away. You have to see them so you can understand what they’re protecting and why.

That’s a different kind of work than processing feelings. It’s more like diagnostics. You need to find the code that’s running the machine and reading it clearly for the first time.

The Question You’ve Been Avoiding

It won’t give you the whole picture. But it will show you where to start looking.

Ask yourself what would it mean about you, and about them, if you started to feel okay?

Don’t answer it quickly and don’t answer it the way you have been since they died. Sit with what actually comes up, no matter how uncomfortable it is. And it’s probably going to be almost intolerably uncomfortable.

Whatever comes up isn’t grief. It’s the assumptions underneath the grief. It’s the foundation of your protection system that’s been running without your permission.

That’s the loyalty trap and seeing it clearly is the beginning of the way out.

The Way Out

You’re never going to be the man you were before. That man is gone and you know it.

But the man on the other side of this isn’t a lesser version. He carries the loss while he moves forward. He honours who he’s lost by living in a way that would make them proud, not by standing guard at a post that doesn’t need him anymore.

The way out isn’t through the emotion. It’s through the map.

Leaving your post isn’t betrayal.

It’s your next act of love.

If this landed with you, there’s a reason.

I’m building a program called Leading Through Loss. It’s designed to help men create the map. It’s a structured process for seeing exactly what’s keeping you at the post and where it comes from.

It’s not therapy. It’s not a support group. It’s diagnostics , the same kind I described above, done properly, with a guide.

If you want to know when it’s ready, put your name below. No pitch. Just a notification.

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Photo by Eleni Afiontzi on Unsplash

Grief is the long, complex and painful process of adapting to a loss that upends everything. You don’t think the same things. You don’t feel the same things. And you can’t do the same things.

You feel like a different, lesser human being whose life has been frozen at the time of death. You can’t move forward and you might not even want to. Moving forward seems like leaving them behind. Every option feels like hell so you might as well choose the one that keeps you closest to the person who died.

The problem is that you’re no longer really living and you’re hurting the people who didn’t die.

Something is terribly wrong and you know it. You can’t name it and you’re not sure you want to. But it’s there. It’s everywhere. You’re isolating yourself from your family and friends, because it’s better than dumping your shit on them. You’re driving around for a half hour rather than coming straight home from work. You’re numbing your pain with all kinds of things that you know are making it worse.

Most men don’t call that grief. They call it stress or being busy. More often than not, they knuckle down and call it nothing at all.

But here’s what’s actually happening. The part that’s really keeping you stuck didn’t start with the loss.

It started long before.

Present & Absent All At Once

Here’s what most people get wrong about a man after a devastating loss. They see how hard he is to reach and think he’s checked out or doesn’t care. They might even think he’s move on much more easily than should be possible.

Usually, they’re not true. He’s protecting himself. He’s trapped in something he can’t see clearly enough to escape.

Picture a guy who’d never miss his son’s football games. Now he hardly shows up at all. It’s not because he doesn’t love his son. He loves him more than life itself.

But since the loss of his daughter a few years ago, he’s barely holding it together. It’s taking everything he’s got to keep a lid on the explosive emotions that are eating him alive. He’s terrified that if he shows up to the games, he’ll fall apart in public while he’s surrounded by other families. And if that happens, he’ll humiliate himself and his son.

That man isn’t checked out. He’s protecting himself.

And if you’re honest, you know exactly what that feels like.

Maybe it’s not football games. Maybe it’s the one-word answers you give your wife when you can see her reaching out. You know you’re failing her but you’re terrified that if you open up, you’ll fall into a pit you’ll never be able to climb out of. That if that happens, you’ll be responsible for destroying what’s left of your family.

Your behaviour makes complete sense once you look deeper and see what it’s protecting.

The problem is the price. The same walls keeping you from falling apart are also keeping you from the people and responsibilities that give your life meaning. You’ve got the brake jammed to the floor at exactly the moment you most need to move.

Facts Written in Blood

Underneath every protective behaviour is a worry. And underneath every worry is an assumption that justifies it. It feels less like an opinion and more like a fact written in blood. You see it as an obvious truth about how the world works, what people are like, and what you deserve.

Your assumptions might look like this:

• If my kids see how broken I am, they’ll stop feeling safe with me. And I’ll have failed them in a way I can’t undo.

• If I let people in before I’m ready, I’ll say something that damages those relationships permanently.

• If I allow myself to feel better, it means I’m leaving her behind.

Take a second with those. Do any of them sound familiar?

If they do, it isn’t because you’re weak or damaged. It’s because you’re human. Belief systems act like a filter on reality. Your brain uses prior assumptions, values and expectations to make sense of the world because there’s far too much going on to evaluate everything from scratch. Those belief systems don’t just help you navigate reality. They distort it.

And here’s the question worth sitting with: where did those beliefs come from in the first place?

The Operating System Older Than the Loss

The loss didn’t create them. It cranked up the volume on them.

Almost none of the beliefs driving your life started with the loss. They were already there, shaping how you moved through the world, long before any of this happened.

You already knew what men are supposed to do when things get hard. You’re weak if you show people the emotions you’re feeling, or even acknowledge them to yourself. You owe the people you love strength because they’re depending on you. If you break, everything breaks.

They didn’t start with the loss. They’ve been passed down through generations. They’ve been reinforced by the men you’ve modelled yourself after. They’ve always been a part of you. They were just waiting for something big enough to bring them fully to the surface.

Your loss was that thing.

Which means this isn’t just about grief. It’s about a decades-old story you’ve been telling yourself about what you’re allowed to feel, who you’re allowed to be, and what moving forward is going to cost you.

And here’s what that means:

You can’t grieve your way out of your belief system.

You’re not just carrying the loss. You’re running an operating system that makes carrying your loss unbearably hard. That system was installed long before they died.

The grief work and the belief work are not the same work.

Finally Seeing it Clearly

Most men who do eventually ask for help focus on the loss itself. Talking through and processing it matters. But for a lot of men it isn’t enough because the loss is only part of what’s keeping them stuck.

What actually moves the needle is being able to see the full pattern in front of you. When it’s laid out clearly, you get past “I’m isolating myself.” You can see what you’re doing, what you’re afraid will happen if you stop, and what belief underneath it you’ve been treating like a fact for twenty years.

Something important starts to change when you can see that map. Not because the grief disappears. You’ll carry it in one form or another for the rest of your life, and that’s the truth nobody tells you. But grief that’s running your life and grief that’s simply part of your life are two very different things.

What changes is that you can finally see that you’re not broken.

You’re protecting yourself from your worst fears coming true. That protection made sense at one point in your life. It may have been the only option you had. But you’re not that same person anymore and those beliefs can be examined, questioned and released.

Instead of them having a grip on you, you can have a grip on them.

That’s the moment men describe when they talk about feeling the earth shift under their feet. It’s not the grief magically lifting. It’s seeing, for the first time, that what was keeping them stuck wasn’t the loss itself.

It was an old belief system that the loss turned all the way up.

And that’s something you can actually work with.

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This is Personal

I lived this pattern for years after my first wife’s suicide. I drank every day for almost five years after her death. I was harming myself and harming my family and couldn’t admit it to myself.

I didn’t realize I was drinking to avoid the pain I needed to face. I didn’t know I was in pain. I thought I’d put her death behind me. But I couldn’t stop drinking, no matter how much it was costing me.

I couldn’t imagine a life that wasn’t worse without booze. I wouldn’t be able to socialize with people unless I was half in the bag. People wouldn’t even like the sober Jay. And if I told my wife I needed help, she’d know I was lying to her all those years when I said I had everything under control.

Then I stopped. And the complete opposite of all those beliefs came true. I remember walking the dog, thinking, “I completely made up every one of those beliefs and they kept me in prison for years.”

That’s the moment. Not when the grief lifted. When I finally saw what was underneath it.

I’ve heard almost every man who does this work describe a version of that same walk. They’ve experienced a different loss, hold different beliefs and are stuck in a different prison. They all have the same realization and almost always say the same thing at the end:

I didn’t realize how much of this was already there before the loss. It’s been running my life for as long as I can remember.

The grief is real and so is the love behind it. But the beliefs that they had to carry it alone, that showing it would cost them something, that moving forward meant leaving someone behind were more ancient than the loss.

If you’re reading this and something about it feels true, I’m building something for you.

It’s a focused process that helps you build exactly the kind of map this piece describes. It’s not therapy or a support group. Its a structured way to get clear on what’s actually keeping you stuck. You’ll uncover the patterns, the protection, and the beliefs underneath it all.

It’s almost ready. If you want to know when the door opens, raise your hand.

Send me a message

Or drop a comment and I’ll make sure you’re the first to hear about it.

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